The Pandora's box opened a mere four days before the British election, when Britain's Sunday Times published the now infamous Downing Street Memo. The leaked document, headed "Secret and Strictly Personal—For UK Eyes Only," summarizes a July 23, 2002 meeting held at 10 Downing Street and called by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, during which intelligence chiefs and top policy advisors were informed that ongoing talks with the Bush administration had revealed that war with Iraq was "inevitable." Among those present was John Dearlove, (a.k.a. "C") chief of MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA. Recently returned from Washington, Dearlove reported to the group: "Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy [emphasis added]." According to Dearlove, there was no "patience" for going the UN route or publicizing Saddam's regime's record. At the meeting, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw announced plans to meet with Colin Powell later in the week, stating: "It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbors, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran."
The DSM also stated that previous to the July 23 gathering, separate meetings had been scheduled August 1-4, between British military planners and Centcom (a command of the US Department of Defense, responsible for US security interests in the Middle East), Rumsfeld, and then Bush, to discuss two US-stated options for waging war, and three British-stated options for their "involvement in US war efforts. There was no clear timetable, no plan of attack chosen, but the intention was clear—once "legal justification for the use of force" could be created, either by inciting Saddam or by "fixing" evidence, "we should work on the assumption that the UK would take part" in efforts to create regime change in Iraq. "The US had already begun 'spikes of activity' to put pressure on the regime."
While no specific definition was given regarding "spikes of activity," there were reports of US Special Forces activity, in both the north and the south of Iraq months before the war began. I myself interviewed a retired 15-year Special Forces Marine in Baghdad last summer, a "weapons trainer" for Dyncorp, who told me that pre-retirement he had been in Iraq—"down south"—working on operations before the war had begun. And it is well-known that after the "Operation Desert Fox" bombing campaign in December 1998, British and American aircraft patrolled Iraq's "no-fly" zones in the north and south, flying thousands of smaller bombing missions meant to take out military targets, as well as killing and injuring hundreds of civilians. These bombing missions were undertaken, allegedly, to protect anti-Saddam northern Kurds and southern Shiites from retaliation stemming from their alliance with US forces against Saddam in the first Gulf War.
In his introduction to the book Iraq Under Siege, Anthony Arnove states, "By the end of 1999,US and UK forces had flown more than 6,000 sorties, dropped more than 1,800 bombs, and hit more than 450 targets. The Pentagon alone spent more than $1 billion in 1999 to maintain its force of 200 airplanes, 19 warships, and 22,000 troops which [were] part of the operation. In 2000, the US and UK flew even more sorties than in 1999. These numbers dropped in 2001 and early 2002, but started to escalate significantly in summer 2002" [emphasis added].
In a recent TomPaine.com article, Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst with 27 years of experience, explains: "British government documents released to Parliament show that American and British aircraft dropped no bombs on Iraq in March 2002, 10 tons of bombs in July, and 54.6 tons in September. Nevertheless, this failed to provoke Saddam Hussein into the kind of reaction that could be used as an ostensible casus belli [motive for war]."
The contents of the DSM received widespread attention in Britain and throughout Europe, yet the American media showed little or no interest in investigating or writing about it. Interestingly, initially this fact received more attention in the media than the memo itself. According to a June 8 USA Today article, "The New York Times wrote about the memo May 2, but didn't mention until its 15th paragraph that the memo stated US officials had 'fixed' intelligence and facts. Knight Ridder newspapers distributed a story May 6 that said the memo 'claims President Bush...was determined to ensure that US intelligence data supported his policy.' The Los Angeles Times wrote
about the memo May 12, the Washington Post followed on May 15 and the New York Times revisited the news on May 20. None of the stories appeared on the newspapers' front pages. Several other major media outlets, including the evening news programs on ABC, CBS, and NBC, had not said a word about the document before Tuesday. Today marks USA Today's first mention."
In a June 9 article, Salon.com's Eric Broehlert wrote, "According to TV Eyes, an around-the-clock monitoring service, between May 1 and June 6 the story received approximately 20 mentions on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS combined. By contrast, during the same five-week period, the same outlets found time to mention 263 times the tabloid controversy that erupted when a photograph showing Saddam Hussein in his underwear was leaked to the British press." (Salon published the DSM on May 19.)
The DSM story "had no legs"—explained an article entitled "Readers' Representative: Downing Street Memo's Route to Paper," article in the June 12 Minneapolis Star-Tribune— "unless you went online" where "cyberspace was roiling with it." Tracking its own path of non-coverage to coverage—perhaps a model for what happened with newspapers across the country—the Star Tribune claimed it was a campaign mounted by Internet readers demanding coverage that prompted editors to action. Their action was, however, limited in that editors did nothing but watch and wait for the story to come across news wire services such as AP or Reuters. (On June 18, AP became the first wire service to run a memo story.) But the wires were silent. Finally a staff reporter at the Star Tribune was assigned the story and by May 11 it was ready to go. The assigning editor wanted page one placement for the story and held it back for two days due to "heavy competition" from other stories deemed more important. By May 13, he didn't want to wait any longer and he ran the story on page three.
It "was a good story and got good play on A3," Star-Tribune managing editor Scott Gillespie, was quoted as saying. He admitted the memo story "lacked the impact of page one, but it wasn't burying the story," as readers claimed while continuing to demand more info and a page one story about the memo. On Memorial Day an editorial mentioned the memo. "Sorry, not Page 1," but readers persisted in asking why the story didn't get more play. On June 3 the Op-Ed page printed the entire Downing Street memo—and was the first newspaper in the US to do, according to the Star Tribune. However, the newspaper's readers, still not sated, once again demanded Page 1. Five days later, after Bush and Blair commented on the memo at a joint press conference and stated that the claim in the memo that facts were "fixed" was untrue, readers finally got their wish as the story hit the Star-Tribune's front page. But they complained again, albeit with a new gripe, that "reporters didn't challenge Bush and Blair aggressively enough."
The Star-Tribune piece downplayed the validity "of e-mail campaigns fomented by political-action websites that smack more of Astroturf [form letters generated by these websites] than grassroots" and how the "technique isn't fooling...ombudsmen around the country who chat regularly about the latest campaigns." At the same time, the article admitted that "some of the Downing Street reaction...was genuine and spontaneous." If anything, the article concludes, the DSM saga "reveals a rusty news industry infrastructure that still hasn't absorbed the Internet into its newsgathering habits."
Salon's Boehlert went to great lengths to track DSM media coverage. Citing community after community across the country where "readers have been badgering their local newspapers to examine the memo story," he wrote, "None of the published correspondence appears to be form letters or so-called Astroturf letters designed to mimic grassroots support for a particular issue." He blamed "a mainstream press...genuinely afraid to ask tough questions and write tough stories about the Bush administration." Yet, at least two editors Boehlert quotes state clearly—the news was not new:
"Given what has been reported about war planning in Washington, the revelations about the Downing Street meeting did not seem like a bolt from the blue."—New York Times Washington bureau chief Phil Taubman.
"The memo doesn't say something we haven't heard in one way or another over the last two-and-a-half years."—Jim Cox, USA Today's senior assignment editor for foreign news.
In the middle of all the apologies, excuses, self-admonishing and finger-pointing emanating from the media, on June 12, the Sunday Times published a second leaked "Personal Secret—UK Eyes Only" document— "Iraq: Conditions for Military Action." Dated July 21, 2002, it perhaps served as an agenda to the DSM July 23 meeting, inviting Ministers to: "1. Note the latest position on US military planning and timescales; 2. Agree that that the objective of any military action should be a stable and law-abiding Iraq; 3. Agree to engage the US on the need to set military plans within a realistic political strategy, which includes identifying the succession to Saddam Hussein and creating the conditions necessary to justify government military action, which might include an ultimatum for the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq [emphasis added]; 4. Note the potentially long lead times involved in equipping UK Armed Forces... and agree that the MOD [Minister of Defense] should bring forward proposals for the procurement of Urgent Operational Requirements under cover of the lessons learned from Afghanistan; and 5. Agree to the establishment of an ad hoc group of officials under Cabinet Office Chairmanship to consider the development of an information campaign to be agreed with the US" [emphasis added].
The document went on to acknowledge that the US government's military planning "lacks a political framework" and "little thought has been given to creating the political conditions for military actions, or the aftermath and how to shape it." It also revealed an April 2002 meeting between Bush and Blair at Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas where Blair told Bush "the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq's WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted."
The LA Times followed with a brilliant article on June 15, citing text received from the London Times, of six new documents labeled "secret" or "confidential." Providing excerpts, the article gives context within the timeframe leading up to the war. The article illuminates that the documents:
· contain little discussion about whether to mount a military campaign. The focus instead is on how the campaign should be presented to win the widest support and the importance for Britain of working through the United Nations so an invasion could be seen as legal under international law;
· present a picture of a US government fed up with the policy of containing Iraq, skeptical of the UN and focused on ousting Hussein;
· state that the economic sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War were likely to fail, and that, in any case, the US had already given up on them;
· say the British view was that any invasion for the purpose of regime change has no basis under international law;
· appear to rule out any action in Iraq short of an invasion.
The article ends with a final comment from one of the documents dated March 8, 2002. "In sum, despite the considerable difficulties, the use of overriding force in a ground campaign is the only option that we can be confident will remove Saddam and bring Iraq back into the international community."
For some the point is moot as to whether or not George Bush planned to remove Saddam Hussein long before he stated his intention to do so to the American people and to the world. Last October, journalist Russ Baker wrote an article based on two taped interviews and subsequent conversations he had with author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz originally posted at Guerilla News Network (www.gnn.tv). Herskowitz has written or co-written over 30 books, was hired by Bush's presidential campaign team in 1999 to ghost-write the then-candidate's autobiography and, according to Baker, had unfettered access to Bush on approximately 20 occasions. Herskowitz told Baker that Bush "was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999. It was on his mind. He said to me: 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, 'If I have a chance to invade....if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."
According to Baker, in addition to discussing the "floundering" of his own businesses, "Herskowitz said Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow." Herskowitz also told Baker that "Bush's circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War...They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches."
Baker wrote: "Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter's political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush's father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents—Grenada and Panama—and gained politically. But there were successful small wars, and then there were quagmires, and apparently George H.W. Bush and his son did not see eye to eye...According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House—ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. 'Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.'"
This tactical strategy was fleshed out in the September 2000 report, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," published by the neo-conservative think-tank Project for a New American Century [PNAC]. It outlined plans to safeguard American "globally preeminent military capability" and "superiority," advocated attacks on both Afghanistan and Iraq, and bemoaned the slow pace of bringing the military up to snuff—"absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor." It called for the US to "fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars" as a "core mission." As stated by Glasgow Sunday Times editor Neil Mackay, "it was "drawn up for Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, and Jeb Bush." John Bolton served as one of PNAC's directors.
Two New Yorker articles appearing in May and October, 2003 provide details of how Bolton and other PNAC supporters, Runsfeld and Wolfowitz among them, made drastic changes to well-established intelligence avenues, according to writer Seymour Hersh, in order to find evidence of what they and the PNAC report claimed—"that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons." Shortly after his swearing in as Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control in May, 2001, Bolton demanded that he and a "hand-chosen group" of loyalists have access to raw, unvetted, CIA-gathered data....The whole point of the intelligence system in place [previsouly]...was 'to prevent raw intelligence from getting people who would be misled....In essence, [Bolton] would be running his own intelligence operation, without any guidance or support." Then, in
the days after 9/11, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz created the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, another like-minded "cabal" whose job it was to gather first-hand accounts of defectors like Ahmad Chalabi that supported the presence of WMD in Iraq.
There was no oversight to either of these intelligence-gathering entities, which, as the information came in, passed it on to the White House without running it through any traditional analysis. Yet a report authorized by Vice President Cheney to look into claims of Saddam purchasing nuclear ingredients, and investigated by former ambassador Joe Wilson, who concluded that no such sale ever took place, was ignored.
The question is: Why the fuss now? If this is all old news and the media actually has been saying Bush lied about the reasons for going to war and misled the American people for the last two and a half years, without anyone seeming to care, why all the fuss now? Perhaps it is the way the media has been saying it. A transcript of a panel discussion in Washington, DC, sponsored by Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and broadcast on C-Span last November, sheds some light on the media's methods of expression. When a member of the audience said that she felt Bush stated a "lie" during his campaign "that was never objectively reported on," and asked if there was a difference between "balanced" and "objective" reporting, panel members Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times and Susan Page of USA Today responded as follows:
Bumiller: That's why it's very hard to write those [articles], because you can't say George Bush is wrong here. There's no way you can say that in the New York Times. So we contort ourselves up and say, "Actually"—I actually once wrote this sentence: "Mr. Bush's statement did not exactly..." It was some completely upside down statement that was basically saying he wasn't telling the truth. And I got an e-mail from somebody saying, "What's wrong with you guys? Why can't you just say it plainly?" But there's just—
Loren Ghiglione (Medill School of Journalism, Moderator): Why can't you say it plainly?
Bumiller: You can't just say the president is lying. You don't just say that in the...you just say—
Ghiglione: Well, why can't you?
[Laughter from the audience.]
Bumiller: You can in an editorial, but I'm sorry, you can't in a news column. Mr. Bush is lying? You can say Mr. Bush is, you can say...
[Murmuring and laughter continue from audience]
Bumiller [to audience]: And stop the fussing! You can say Mr. Bush's statement was not factually accurate. You can't say the president is lying—that's a judgment call.
Page: I think it's much more powerful to say, "However, the president's statement did not reflect the record"—
Bumiller: Or "was not factually accurate."
On June 16, Rep. John Conyers, Jr., D-MI and Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, along with approximately three dozen members of Congress, held a public forum on the DSM and related evidence of efforts to cook the books on pre-war intelligence. The meeting was held in a tiny basement room of the Capital Building. Requests to hold the forum in a larger room were denied by House Republicans, who also scheduled what some called a "purposeful" and "unprecedented" 11 consecutive votes at the same time of the forum, with the intention of disrupting it. Speakers urged Congress to hold an official inquiry into the authenticity of the DSM and its ramifications. Addressing the question of impeachment, Representative Charles B. Rangel, D-NY, bluntly asked, "Has the president misled, or deliberately misled, the Congress?"
At press time 122 members of Congress and 560,000 American citizens had signed onto a letter addressed to President Bush asking about the accuracy of the DSM, efforts to create an ultimatum regarding weapons inspections, his recruiting allies before seeking Congressional authorization for war, when he and Blair made the decision to invade Iraq, and if there was a coordinated effort to "fix" the intelligence and facts around the policy.
The tumult over the DSM is only one gushing hole among many in the Bush camp dike. Bush's ratings (and to a greater degree those of Congress) are plummeting in the polls on every topic from his Social Security plan and its chances of success, to his handling of the Iraq war, to his job performance. In a New York Times/CBS News Poll, 61 percent of those queried said "the country had gone off in the wrong direction." More Americans say the economy is getting worse (to 36 percent from 30 percent in February). Fallout from the Iraq war is growing every day, and has begun to melt party lines as moderate Republicans and Democrats have started to unite with a loud singular voice, demanding that a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq be addressed via legislation. On the partisan front, Democrats seem to be holding tough in the fight against John Bolton's nomination as UN ambassador, recently rejecting a Republican-offered compromise. Citing the DSM, they referenced Bolton's possible involvement in exaggerating several countries weapons capabilities—among them Syria and Iraq, and "on classified National Security Agency intercepts," according to Senator Christopher Dodd, D-CT. In August 2002, Bolton was apparently clear on his position regarding Iraq, expounding during a BBC radio broadcast, that he "certainly hoped" Saddam would be removed within the year. "Let there be no mistake, while we also insist on the reintroduction of the weapons inspectors, our policy at the same time insists on regime change in Baghdad and that policy will not be altered, whether inspectors go in or not."
It has yet to be seen whether a case for impeachment will be made proving that Bush lied. It is clear, however, that the majority of Americans are beginning to unite in a nonpartisan effort, questioning the actions of the Bush administration.
My father is a communications and media professor, and he likes to make fun of his students for not remembering anything. His latest jab is to tell them they don't have to worry about Alzheimer's disease—because they have no memory to lose anyway. This would be sarcastic, were it not accurate. But it's not just his students.
Western society seems to be in the grips of a collective amnesia that reminds me of the scene in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, in which the entire town forgets everything, and the local fortune teller reads the cards to tell people what happened to them in the past.
In therapy work it's generally assumed that people who can't remember the past have a reason for not doing so. It's either too disturbing, they feel guilty about it, or the burden is too great. I would say that all three count these days. But lately, we've had a vivid reminder of something called Watergate—something we really should remember, which seems logical enough not to.
To most, Deep Throat was a long-forgotten movie character (Hal Holbrook in All the President's Men), before he emerged from the recesses of secrecy and the past in early June, identifying himself by name: Mark Felt. He was the high-ranking FBI official and secret source who made the Washington Post's exposes of the Watergate scandal possible. These were the articles, published between 1972 and 1974, that proved that Nixon really did know about the bugging of the Democratic campaign headquarters, and the associated money trail, and much else besides.
While we have a lot to thank Deep Throat for, I think it's a good time go over what else it took to bring down old Dick Nixon. I do so for the benefit of everyone who sees all the parallels between then and now: the war, the paranoia, the secrecy, the crimes, the lies, and the intense frustration of the people at having no impact on government.
Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, the year that Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. The man who eventually presided over the most criminally intent White House before the present day came into power as two of the most articulate, beloved civil rights leaders lay recently buried.
Nixon was elected, in part, because he had a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War. Whatever that plan was, what actually happened was that Nixon secretly stepped up bombing campaigns and spread the war to Laos and Cambodia, laying waste to both countries and opening up Cambodia to the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. Though the war had officially begun just four years earlier, in 1964, Nixon's secret plan extended US involvement in the war for another six years.
Two short years after he took office, in the spring of 1970, Nixon made his infamous speech announcing that, behind the nation's back, he had been bombing Cambodia. US campuses erupted in protest, and fully one third of them were either closed down before the semester ended or came close to being closed. This was the spring of the Kent State shootings—when the National Guard opened fire and killed four students, all of whom were either passersby or photographers. If you want a taste of that era, dig out the Neil Young song "Ohio," which was written, recorded, manufactured, and available in record stores and on the radio just days after the shootings at Kent.
But the Vietnam War, tearing the country apart, dragged on. And this was the backdrop for the events of the spring of 1972—when five burglars with sophisticated bugging equipment, a lot of money, and the phone numbers of very powerful people in their pockets were arrested early one morning in the Watergate complex, attempting to place eavesdropping devices in the Democratic National Headquarters. Quickly, this bugging was connected to an organization called CREEP—the Committee to Re-elect the President. The thing I love most about the Watergate crooks is that at least they had a sense of humor.
You would think that the break-in, combined with the endless, devastating war and the Kent State shootings (along with the less-publicized shootings of students at Jackson State, SUNY Buffalo, and elsewhere), would have been enough to wake people up. There was, in reality, little else in the news. Bodies of American boys were coming home from Southeast Asia at a shocking rate. And then Nixon was caught cheating on his opponents. His excuse was he didn't know.
Then, one bit at a time, the shit hit the fan. There was a lot of help from Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Mark Felt, and the editors of the Post, who kept up a stream of reporting that could not be avoided by the media. And though it took a long time, the blood-soaked soil of the country was fertile. After that came the Pentagon Papers story—a series of articles by Neil Sheehan in the New York Times that proved, through secret government documents, that the Nixon administration knew about the atrocities of Vietnam, and that it had been working with a plan to lie to the people.
But consider that the Watergate story broke in the spring of 1972 and developed fairly steadily, such that by the November 1972 election, people pretty much knew what had happened. Yet Nixon won 49 states, losing only Massachusetts and Washington, DC, to George McGovern.
Meanwhile, in the years encompasing Nixon's reign, the country had gone through its greatest activist phase since the American Revolution. The decade following the Kennedy assassination was a time of unprecedented community involvement, protest, and creative outpouring. Students had taken over college campuses—not just through demonstrations, but also through changes in curriculum, banning the ROTC from some places, taking over student governance, and many other changes. Many people were aware of what was going on—far more than today, despite our beloved Internet. Still, Nixon, his war, and his scandals marched on.
Under the combined pressure of these developments, one by one, the "president's men" resigned. Some were convicted of felonies associated with Watergate. Some went to prison. Many spilled the beans on the whole affair. There was the issue of the Nixon tapes and the long gap in one of them.
Yet Nixon himself, as if enchanted by some evil spell, or charmed by presidential power, lived on like the undead. Somehow he kept enough people believing that he was totally innocent that they were reluctant to associate him with the break-in, or blame him for the war. But a movement against him was brewing. Finally, Republican leaders in Congress took action and, with their blessing, impeachment proceedings were discussed. It was at this point that Nixon resigned, in the summer of 1974. He quit more than two years after Watergate, four years after Kent State, and a decade after the Vietnam War officially had begun.
So, for those wondering what it takes to bring down a president or an entire administration, you now have a basis for comparison. The past is not always a good predictor of the future, but it's usually the best one we have. And by that method, it's going to take a long time for people to gain their focus and find their voice. And the world scene may need to get a lot uglier.
And yes, it's also quite possible that we will go on to see a Condi Rice or Jeb Bush presidency become a reality in 2008, no matter how badly Iraq is going, no matter what the state of the economy, and no matter what crimes have been committed so far. After all, crime is in the eyes of the victim.