Friday, March 19, 2004, Knight-Ridder by William Douglas WASHINGTON – Enactment of a sweeping Medicare reform law last year was supposed to be the crowning achievement of President Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” as he readied himself for re-election. By providing a federally subsidized prescription-drug benefit for senior citizens, albeit a limited one, administration officials felt they usurped a major issue from the Democrats and cut into Democratic support among seniors age 65 and over – an especially important voting bloc in key battleground states such as Florida. But less than four months after he signed it into law on Dec. 8, […]
Daily Archives: March 23, 2004
8 posts
March 18, 2004, The Guardian by David Leigh Jay Garner, the US general abruptly dismissed as Iraq’s first occupation administrator after a month in the job, says he fell out with the Bush circle because he wanted free elections and rejected an imposed programme of privatisation.
Jan. 11, 2004, 60 Minutes (CBS) A year ago, Paul O’Neill was fired from his job as George Bush’s Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president’s policy on tax cuts. Now, O’Neill – who is known for speaking his mind – talks for the first time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White House is run. Entitled “The Price of Loyalty,” the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who […]
July 6, 2003, New York Times by Joseph C. Wilson 4th Did the Bush administration manipulate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons programs to justify an invasion of Iraq? Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq’s nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. For 23 years, from 1976 to 1998, I was a career foreign service officer and ambassador. In 1990, as chargé d’affaires in Baghdad, I was the last American diplomat to meet with […]
Feb. 4, 2003 This is a 60 Minutes II broadcast from Feb. 4, 2004. In February, Secretary of State Colin Powell made a surprising admission. He told The Washington Post that he doesn’t know whether he would have recommended the invasion of Iraq if he had been told at the time that there were no stockpiles of banned weapons. Powell said that when he made the case for war before the United Nations one year ago, he used evidence that reflected the best judgments of the intelligence agencies. But long before the war started, there was plenty of doubt among […]
[ Bush Administration former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has come under vindictive attack from the White House for criticizing the Administration’s failure to heed urgent warnings regarding the al Qaeda threat before 9/11. These sorts of counterattacks are nothing new. They are becoming common place necessities for Team Bush, as high-level officials continue to defect, unraveling the fabric of lies which clothes Administration policy. Notable defectors include Richard Foster, the Medicare program’s actuary who blew the cover on Administration lies to Congress; Greg Thielmann, the analyst in charge of assessing the Iraqi weapons threat for Colin Powell’s intelligence bureau, who […]
60 Minutes, March 21, 2004 (CBS) In the aftermath of Sept. 11, President Bush ordered his then top anti-terrorism adviser to look for a link between Iraq and the attacks, despite being told there didn’t seem to be one. The charge comes from the adviser, Richard Clarke, in an exclusive interview on 60 Minutes. The administration maintains that it cannot find any evidence that the conversation about an Iraq-9/11 tie-in ever took place. Clarke also tells CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl that White House officials were tepid in their response when he urged them months before Sept. 11 to meet […]
[ The books Hertsgaard reviews below are some good ones. Other important, recent books in the topic area include Craig Unger’s House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World’s Two Most Powerful Dynasties (in which Unger shows that starting between 9/11 and 9/13, 2001, when all other private planes were grounded, 140 Saudis, including dozens of members of the bin Laden family, were given safe passage out of the U.S., unbothered by the FBI, thanks to clearance by the Bush White House … and much more) Richard Clarke’s Against All Enemies (in which then top counterterrorism […]