These are just a few snippets. It’s a very substantial and important piece which you can read here: http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/02/bush-oral-history200902?printable=true¤tPage=all
Jesselyn Radack, ethics adviser at the Department of Justice: I was called with the specific question of whether or not the F.B.I. on the ground could interrogate [Lindh] without counsel. And I had been told unambiguously that Lindh’s parents had retained counsel for him. I gave that advice on a Friday, and the same attorney at Justice who inquired called back on Monday and said essentially, Oops, they did it anyway. They interrogated him anyway. What should we do now? My office was there to help correct mistakes. And I said, Well, this is an unethical interrogation, so you should seal it off and use it only for intelligence-gathering purposes or national security, but not for criminal prosecution.
A few weeks later, Attorney General Ashcroft held one of his dramatic press conferences, in which he announced a complaint being filed against Lindh. He was asked if Lindh had been permitted counsel. And he said, in effect, To our knowledge, the subject has not requested counsel. That was just completely false. About two weeks after that he held another press conference, because this was the first high-profile terrorism prosecution after 9/11. And in that press conference he was asked again about Lindh’s rights, and he said that Lindh’s rights had been carefully, scrupulously guarded, which, again, was contrary to the facts, and contrary to the picture that was circulating around the world of Lindh blindfolded, gagged, naked, bound to a board.
December 17, 2001 Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, where Dick Cheney had been C.E.O., is awarded a 10-year omnibus contract to provide the Pentagon with support services for everything from fighting oil-well fires to building military bases to serving meals. As defense secretary under George H. W. Bush, Cheney had pushed strenuously to outsource a variety of military functions to private contractors—part of a broader effort to transfer government functions of all kinds to the private sector.
Rick Piltz, senior associate, U.S. Climate Change Science Program: At the beginning of the Bush administration, Ari Patrinos, a very senior science official who had run the Department of Energy’s climate-change research program for many years, and a half-dozen high-ranking federal science officials were brought together and told to explain the science and help develop policy options for a proactive climate-change policy for the administration. They moved into an office downtown, and they worked very hard and were briefing at the Cabinet level, in the White House. Cheney was there, Colin Powell was there, Commerce Secretary [Don] Evans was there. They were making the case on climate change.
And one day they were told: Take it down, pack it up, go back to your offices—we don’t need you anymore.
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, British ambassador to the United Nations and later the British special representative in Iraq: When I arrived in New York, in July 1998, it was quite clear to me that all the members of the Security Council, including the United States, knew well that there was no current work being done on any kind of nuclear-weapons capability in Iraq.
It was, therefore, extraordinary to me that later on in this saga there should have been any kind of hint that Iraq had a current capability. Of course, there were worries that Iraq might try, if the opportunity presented itself, to reconstitute that capability. And therefore we kept a very close eye, as governments do in their various ways, on Iraq trying to get hold of nuclear base materials, such as uranium or uranium yellowcake, or trying to get the machinery that was necessary to develop nuclear-weapons-grade material.
We were watching this the whole time. There was never any proof, never any hard intelligence, that they had succeeded in doing that. And the American system was entirely aware of this.
Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector for Iraq: The most remarkable thing was the talk that we had with the vice president before we were taken to Mr. Bush. To our surprise, we had no idea we would be taken to Mr. Cheney first, but we were, and we sat down, and I thought it was more a sort of a courtesy call before we went on to President Bush.
Much of it was a fairly neutral discussion, but at one point he suddenly said that you must realize that we will not hesitate to discredit you in favor of disarmament. It was a little cryptic. That was how I remembered it, and I think that’s also how Mohamed [El Baradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who was present], remembered it. I was a little perplexed, because it was a total threat, after all, to talk about the discrediting of us. Later, when I reflected on it, I think what he wanted to say was that if you guys don’t come to the right conclusion, then we will take care of the disarmament.
And, of course, a serious and sustained campaign to delegitimize and discredit Blix (and others who worked within the UN weapons inspection program) and the UN was launched through the rightwing media. Here’s Limbaugh in April, 2003:
My [wife] caught a report by Fox News Channel’s Eric Shawn about the U.N. oil-for-food program. This hasn’t been picked up anywhere, but it will come as a blockbuster revelation for anyone wondering why the French, Germans and Russians stood in the way of liberating Iraq. This program was supposed to help the starving Iraqi people. Instead, it was a cash cow.
This is why I always tell you: follow the money. Kofi Annan personally oversaw this program, and okayed requests under this program for things like laser light show equipment and cartoon making apparatus for Baghdad Bob. The United Nations also reaped a tidy 2.2% windfall off every drop of Iraqi oil sold.
Annan operated in secret, accountable to nobody. He’s refused all requests to make records of this sweet deal public. The UN thinks of itself as unaccountable to anyone, but who keeps watch on whether they’re helping the people where they deploy? Claudia Rosett’s New York Times column which you can hear me read below – “Oil, Food and a Whole Lot of Questions” – reports that this program put “a veil of secrecy over tens of billions of dollars in contracts is an invitation to kickbacks, political back-scratching and smuggling done under cover of relief operations.”
Rosett: “I found nothing that would seem to contradict General Tommy Franks’s comment that the system should have been named the ‘oil-for-palace program.’” This is why we don’t want Hans Blix or Koffi Annan anywhere near Iraq. The US is pushing to lift 12-year-old sanctions while the same Russians and French who wanted to lift the sanctions they blamed for Iraqi suffering under Saddam want to keep them in place! Reuters reports that Annan is at the Security Council talking about getting oil flowing again. There is no way Annan wants this embargo to end, because that would end the oil-for-food cash pipeline. This is a huge, huge untold story.
Personal smears against Blix were voiced constantly through this period and if you were in conversation with people who attend mainly or only to rightwing media sources like Limbaugh or the Wall Street Journal editorial page you’ll have a good appreciation of how effective this propaganda campaign was.
Al Franken could be declared the winner of the Minnesota recount as soon as Monday, but due to the peculiarities of Minnesota election law, Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN) could keep the seat bottled up in the courts for weeks or even months before a decisive resolution to the race, making it harder for the Democratic majority in the Senate to seat Franken on even a provisional basis.
