Executive branch pursues policy of secrecy, distortion; GOP closes ranks to defend

Compiled by Bob Strott

Nov. 12 (AGR)-- The Bush White House, irritated by pesky questions from congressional Democrats about how the administration is using taxpayer money, has developed an efficient solution: It will not entertain any more questions from opposition lawmakers.

The decision — one that Democrats and scholars said is highly unusual — was announced in an e-mail sent Wednesday to the staff of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. House committee Democrats had just asked for information about how much the White House spent making and installing the “Mission Accomplished” banner for President Bush’s May 1 speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln.

The director of the White House Office of Administration, Timothy A. Campen, sent an e-mail titled “congressional questions” to majority and minority staff on the House and Senate Appropriations panels. Expressing “the need to add a bit of structure to the Q&A process,” he wrote: “Given the increase in the number and types of requests we are beginning to receive from the House and Senate, and in deference to the various committee chairmen and our desire to better coordinate these requests, I am asking that all requests for information and materials be coordinated through the committee chairmen and be put in writing from the committee.”

He said this would limit “duplicate requests” and help answer questions “in a timely fashion.”

It would also do another thing: prevent Democrats from getting questions answered without the blessing of the GOP committee chairmen.

In a related development, the traditionally nonpartisan Senate Intelligence Committee is increasingly divided over an issue with potentially large implications for the 2004 presidential election: whether President Bush’s decision to go to war over Iraq’s weapons programs and ties to terrorism was based on sound intelligence.

The latest dispute was over a leaked memo that Democrats said was written by one of their staffers, but not circulated among members or approved by the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia.

The memo laid out plans for highlighting contradictions between the intelligence and statements by administration officials. It suggested approaches for beginning a separate Democratic investigation or renewing calls for an independent probe.

On the Senate floor, at a news conference and in press releases, Republicans denounced the memo and demanded that Democrats repudiate it and find out who was responsible.

Sen. Jon Corzine, D-NJ, said the memo is not the real issue. “The real issue is what led to decisions that don’t match with what the reality is that we’ve come to find on the ground in Iraq,” he said.

The Bush administration’s point man on nonproliferation has exaggerated the threat posed by Syria, Libya and Cuba in an effort to build the case that strong action is needed to prevent them from developing weapons of mass destruction, former intelligence officials and independent experts say.

Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton has long been one of the most controversial figures in the Bush administration — a pugnacious neoconservative with a reputation for blunt talk and tough action. The allegations that he is inflating the evidence against regimes that Washington dislikes, come as the administration is defending itself against criticism that it misused intelligence to make the case for invading Iraq.

“Very often, the points he makes have some truth to them, but he simply goes beyond where the facts tell intelligent people they should go,” said Carl W. Ford Jr., who retired in October as head of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research.

“Undersecretary Bolton repeatedly goes beyond the current public intelligence estimates in his description of the proliferation threats,” said Joseph Cirincione, a nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “He offers definitive judgments where there is, at best, only informed speculation about capabilities. In some cases, notably his claim that Cuba has biological weapons, he goes way beyond known capabilities.

“In others, like the claim that Iran has bioweapons or that Syria is developing nuclear weapons, he connects the dots to form a judgment that is not supported by solid evidence, but then presents it as established fact,” Cirincione said. This, he said, undermines US credibility and the ability of policymakers to craft balanced approaches to serious threats.

The Bush administration’s policies have led to increased scrutiny from the Judicial Branch. On November 4, the Supreme Court announced that it wants the Bush administration to defend the secrecy that enveloped lower federal courts’ proceedings involving one of the 1,200 Arab and Muslim men detained by federal authorities after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

In a brief order, the court called on Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson to respond to a Florida resident’s claim that lower courts violated the Constitution when they agreed to keep even the existence of his case a matter of strict confidentiality. The court’s action comes a month after Olson informed the justices that he did not plan to respond.

The court’s order suggests that the justices are keeping a watchful eye on the government’s legal approach to the war on terrorism, including its assertion that much of that war must be conducted in secret, even though the court has yet to accept a case for full argument and decision.

Administration tactics have also led to friction and suspicion on the part of the federal commission created to investigate the events of Sept. 11.

Panel members are trying to obtain copies of the daily Oval Office intelligence report that President Bush received in the weeks before Sept. 11, 2001. The report is known as the President’s Daily Brief and is distributed to Bush and a handful of his top aides every morning.

Officials said the White House, under pressure of a subpoena threat, offered over the last week to make copies of the intelligence briefing available to the commission’s Republican chairman, Thomas H. Kean, the former governor of New Jersey, and Democratic vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former House member from Indiana.

Commission officials said at least three other members of the panel believed that the White House offer was inadequate and planned to press for the commission to consider subpoenaing the White House for the documents.

The official said the commission would also weigh subpoenas on Friday against the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency for information that has so far been withheld from the panel.

A Democratic member of the panel, Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, said White House efforts to withhold the documents were a “mistake.”

“It makes people think that there’s something really nefarious in those documents,” she said.

The possibility of a subpoena was raised last month by Kean when he said publicly that the commission needed access to all intelligence reports that related to the attacks, including the most highly classified intelligence reports that reached President Bush in the Oval Office.

The national commission investigating the Sept. 11 hijacked plane attacks has also decided to subpoena the military’s North American Aerospace Defense Command records for information it promised but did not deliver.

It would be the second subpoena issued by the commission which has complained of delays by some government agencies in providing information needed to complete the investigation by a May deadline.

The panel in May requested information on air traffic control tracking of hijacked aircraft and the agency’s communication with NORAD, the US-Canadian military alliance that scrambled fighter jets during the attacks.

Some members of the commission are interested in the time sequence for notifying the jets that headed to Washington where one of the hijacked planes struck the Pentagon. “The commission has encountered some serious delays in obtaining needed documents from the Department of Defense,” the panel said in a statement.

“We are especially dismayed by problems in the production of the records of activities of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and certain Air Force commands on September 11, 2001,” it said.

The 10-member National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is examining lapses in national security related to the Sept. 11 attacks that killed about 3,000 people.

Sources: Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Reuters, Washington Post

Fury over Bush’s policing of abortion ban

By Julian Borger

Washington, DC, Nov. 8 — The Bush administration has given the US justice department’s civil rights division the job of enforcing a contentious new ban on late-term abortions, it emerged yesterday.

The move has provoked furious accusations that the White House is perverting the government’s role in promoting civil rights.

In the past, the civil rights division has been instrumental in ensuring black Americans have the right to vote and equal access to housing, while prosecuting hate crimes against minorities.

The ban on late abortions, which was signed into law by President George Bush on Wednesday, has become a new legal battleground in the conflict between American liberals and the religious right.

Since the signing, three judges around the country have ordered injunctions that have blocked its enforcement — paving the way for an eventual showdown in the supreme court.

The justice department, under the leadership of the conservative attorney general, John Ashcroft, has vowed to press forward with the enforcement of the law, promising in a statement released this week “to strongly defend the law prohibiting partial-birth abortions using every resource necessary.”

But, Ashcroft’s decision to use the department’s civil rights division, rather than its criminal division, to enforce the measure has brought together two of the most emotionally charged issues in contemporary America: abortion and race.

In a letter to Ashcroft, Democratic members of the House of Representatives judiciary committee accused him of perverting the federal government’s role in promoting civil rights.

“Your decision is a slap in the face of the civil rights community, and does a grave disservice to the many Americans who gave their lives for the cause of civil rights laws in this country,” the letter says.

“It is Orwellian that you would have the civil rights division enforce a law which has been essentially found by the supreme court to violate the civil rights of millions of American women.”

The use of the division is profoundly symbolic for another reason.

The anti-abortion lobby argues that a fetus is a person who, therefore, should have civil rights. The current law on abortion -- defined by the 1973 supreme court ruling Roe vs. Wade -- says a fetus does not have such rights.

The justice department did not return a call yesterday seeking comment on the issue.

Women’s rights organizations suspect that the ban on late term abortions is the first step in a campaign to reverse Roe vs. Wade.

The measure bans a particular procedure in which fetuses in the late stages of pregnancy are aborted by partially delivering them and then puncturing their skull with a sharp object.

Critics of the ban point out that it makes no exceptions for late abortions to protect the life or health of the mother.

An hour after Bush signed the bill on Wednesday, a judge in Nebraska ruled that the law could be unconstitutional because it did not provide adequate safeguards for mothers.

He disagreed with the justice department’s argument that doctors “uniformly agreed that a partial-birth abortion is never necessary to advance the health or life of women.”

The Nebraska judge ruled instead that the medical evidence was inconclusive.

On Thursday, judges in New York and San Francisco issued similar rulings. In California, Judge Phyllis Hamilton ruled that the law appeared unconstitutional because it provided no exemptions for a woman’s health.

Together, the three court orders affect organizations that carry out the overwhelming majority of abortions in the US. They are likely to prevent the ban taking effect until a decision about its constitutionality.

That debate will almost certainly go to the Supreme Court.

Douglas Johnson, a spokesman for the National Right to Life Committee, said the court orders were “distressing,”

“It means that partly born babies will continue to die at the point of seven-inch scissors,” he said.

“Certainly these judicial orders severely impede the government’s ability to protect these premature infants.”

Source: Guardian (UK)

Terrorism law used on Vegas ‘vice lord’

By Suzanne Goldenberg

Nov. 7— The FBI has used the sweeping powers of anti-terrorist legislation enacted in the panicky aftermath of Sept. 11 against the owner of a Las Vegas strip club suspected of bribing local council officials.

Justice department officials say the events in Las Vegas mark the first time the FBI has tried to extend the use of the PATRIOT Act to a corruption investigation.

The move was described by civil rights groups yesterday as proof of the dangers of giving such a free hand to the security agencies.

The PATRIOT Act allows the FBI and other agencies to seize private documents — such as medical records and college transcripts — without obtaining a warrant, or showing probable cause.

It does not require the authorities to admit they have undertaken such actions.

Although the PATRIOT Act went through Congress virtually unchallenged six weeks after Sept.11, Arab-American and civil rights groups have claimed for two years that it puts key freedoms at risk.

Their lobbying, which has been aimed at quashing the act when it comes up for review in 2005, was so successful that last month the attorney general, John Ashcroft, went on a tour of 16 US cities to publicize the act as a tool to save lives.

However, the FBI’s use of the act last week to subpoena two Las Vegas brokers to hand over their records on the strip club owner Michael Galardi, as well as clients serving on the local council, threatened to overshadow Ashcroft’s road-show.

Harry Reid, the veteran Democrat senator from Nevada, said the law had gone too far.

“The law was intended for activities related to terrorism and not to naked women,” he told journalists. “Let me say, with Galardi and his whole gang, I don’t condone, appreciate, or support all their nakedness. But having said that, I haven’t heard anyone say at any time he was involved with terrorism.”

The raids on Galardi’s clubs do not immediately appear to fit criteria for the Bush administration’s invoking of the PATRIOT Act which has given the FBI greater freedom in tracking down terrorist-funding networks.

However, FBI agents used some of the tools Ashcroft described on his speaking tour as lifesaving devices.

They include: delaying notification to targets of search warrants in order to avoid tipping off suspects; access to the business records of suspected terrorists, and “roving” wiretaps in case the target switches phones.

Galardi, whose family owns nearly 20 strip clubs across the US, has been the subject of a long-term investigation into charges that he bribed council members to pass a law that would allow physical contact between dancers and customers.

In September, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in San Diego, and admitted to bribing police to tell him when his clubs were about to be raided.

This week, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that FBI agents had invoked the PATRIOT Act to subpoena two Las Vegas stock brokers to reveal their business records. Officials said they were trying to find evidence of bribery.

However, civil rights activists said the FBI wrongly turned to the act in order to circumvent normal criminal procedure for accessing private documents such as financial records.

“The use of the PATRIOT Act against a sin city vice lord should give pause to anyone who says it has not been abused,” said Laura Murphy, a spokeswoman for the American Civil Liberties Union.

“The attorney general didn’t tell Congress that he needed the PATRIOT Act to raid nudie bars.”

Source: Guardian (UK)

Electorate more polarized than ever

Analysis by Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Nov. 7 (IPS)— Of all the campaign lines delivered in his stump speeches country-wide in the autumn of 2000 this one, “I’m a uniter, not a divider,” was perhaps the most reassuring among voters who were not entirely sure what George W. Bush was all about.

But if the latest massive survey assessing voters’ worldviews and values is correct, it turns out that Bush was misleading in that, as he was when he promised to pursue a “humble” foreign policy.

It turns out that Bush — and the policies he has pursued, particularly in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon — has polarized the electorate to a far greater extent than at any time since 1987, when the Pew Research Centre for the People and the Press first began assessing basic values and outlooks of US voters.

The intensity of that polarization, particularly along party lines, is also unprecedented, a fact that could presage an especially bitter presidential campaign just one year from now.

Democrats and Republicans, who are evenly divided number-wise, have not been so far apart in their basic outlooks since 1987. Nor have they ever felt as intensely about those views, not even on the eve of the 1994 Republican landslide that ended four decades of Democratic control of Congress, according to the report, ‘The 2004 Political Landscape: Evenly Divided and Increasingly Polarized.’

What makes that conclusion all the more remarkable is that the polarization has taken place within just two years of Sept. 11, which created a moment of national unity as strong as any since perhaps the assassination of President John Kennedy 40 years ago.

“That spirit has dissolved amid rising political polarization and anger,” according to Pew Director Andrew Kohut.

The report is based on the views of 2,528 adults who were polled in late July and another group of 1,515 questioned in mid-October.

The gap is widest over national security, says the survey. In the aftermath of 9/11, members of both parties supported an assertive and militaristic foreign policy, but Democrats have shifted away from that position, particularly in the wake of the Iraq war.

In the poll, 69 percent of Republicans agreed that “the best way to ensure peace is through military strength,” a result largely unchanged since last year or even 1999.

While 55 percent of Democrats agreed with that phrase in 2002, the number has subsequently fallen to 44 percent, the lowest percentage ever. The result is that the gap between Republicans and Democrats on this question “has never been wider,” according to Pew.

On this issue, respondents who identified themselves as “independents” — the critical swing group that is likely to decide next year’s election — are “much closer to Democrats than Republicans.” Last year, 62 percent of independents supported “peace through strength;” this year, the number fell to 51 percent.

The two 2003 surveys suggested that disillusionment with the Iraq war, among both Democrats and independents, rose significantly between July and October. While 85 percent of Republicans believed last month that going to war in Iraq was the “right decision,” only 39 percent of Democrats and 59 percent of independents agreed.

On a related question, the survey found significant partisan division over the use of pre-emptive military action against potential enemies. While 83 percent of Republicans believe such attacks are often (34 percent) or sometimes (49 percent) justified, only a narrow majority of 52 percent of Democrats agreed.

The survey also found a significant gap in the ways that members of the two parties assess their patriotism. While nearly every citizen agrees with the statement “I am very patriotic,” the poll found a large and growing division in the intensity with which that view is held.

Today, 71 percent of Republicans, versus only 48 percent of Democrats, say they completely agree with that statement. Again, independents tended more to the Democratic side, with 54 percent indicating complete agreement.

Similarly, asked whether they agreed with the statement, “We should all be willing to fight for our country, whether it is right or wrong,” 62 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of independents said “yes.”

While national security issues sparked some of the biggest gaps, the survey also found major differences on economic and social issues.

Over the past four years, Democrats have become more critical of business and much stronger advocates of the social safety net.

Seventy-two percent of Democrats now say government should do more to help needy people, even at the risk of increasing the federal deficit, and about the same percentage said corporate profits are too high. Only 39 percent of Republicans agreed about helping needy people and 48 percent said they were troubled by corporate profits.

The survey detected a strong across-the-board increase in hostility to immigration, with 82 percent of Republicans and 76 percent of Democrats and independents supporting tighter immigration controls. But there is a growing gap in the intensity of these attitudes, with Republicans feeling more strongly, according to the survey.

It found significant partisan gaps as well over the notion of trading civil liberties for the sake of national security. Over one-half (54 percent) of Republicans said such a trade-off was necessary; only 39 percent of Democrats agreed.

Despite significantly greater tolerance across the board for some social issues, such as interracial dating and homosexuality, gaps on affirmative action are as wide as they were during the Reagan administration. More than four in ten Democrats approve of preferential treatment for blacks and other minorities, compared with 28 percent of independents and only 16 percent of Republicans.

For next year’s presidential elections, the survey found an even 42-42 percent split between Bush and a generic Democrat, with 16 percent undecided.

While independents are generally closer to Democrats in their basic political, social, and economic attitudes, according to the report, the percentage of people who identify themselves as Republicans has risen over the last three years, particularly in some key battleground states, such as Iowa and Michigan.