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BUSH MILITARY RECORD JEB BUSH DONALD MURPHY MICHAEL CHERTOFF |
THE STORY THAT THE CBS FLAP BURIED RUSS BAKER, ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION - Like CBS's staffers and journalists from many media outlets, I explored Bush's National Guard service extensively during the election campaign. What I found were gaps upon puzzles upon misstatements upon nondisclosures. Certain facts are clear: As a young man at Yale, George Bush vocally supported the Vietnam War and criticized others who failed to serve, then got himself into a safe unit for the sons of the privileged, in the Texas Air National Guard. We also know that, for reasons yet unclear, he failed to complete the final two years of a six-year military obligation to fly jets, for which taxpayers had spent a good part of a million dollars training him. - Bush claims that he left his unit prematurely in order to accept a high-level opportunity in campaign management in Alabama. But campaign colleagues described his work as grunt-level make-work, marked by a predilection to show up in the afternoon hours and to brag about carousing the night before. In addition, the widow of the Alabama campaign manager, who was a close friend of Bush's father, told me that Bush was only in Alabama because the senior Bush had begged her husband to hire his son in order to get him out of some kind of trouble back in Texas. -According to the widow of the flyer brought in to replace Bush in the Texas Air Guard, his commanding officer, Jerry Killian(who died in 1984) had explained to her and her husband that Bush had left the unit abruptly because of problems flying his plane -- and Killian had suspected that alcohol abuse had something to do with it. (Bush has admitted to past alcohol problems but not offered specifics relating to his military service.) More than one of his flying comrades indicated that Bush's behavior became suddenly erratic several years into his time with the Guard. (The questioned CBS documents were memos purportedly generated by Killian; his own reputation is unblemished.} -Bush has said on repeated occasions that he continued to fulfill his military obligation while in Alabama, but high-profile efforts to substantiate that, including the offer of reward monies, have turned up no corroboration. And Bush's former ghostwriter told me that Bush admitted to him in 1999 that he had done no service at all in Alabama, claiming to be "excused." One thing is certain about the CBS documents: If they are not real, then they were prepared by someone who had enough inside information to make them look almost real, but who also knew enough to include a few small telltale signs that might point to their inauthenticity - clues that might be overlooked by a news organization racing to put out an important, timely story under competitive pressures. It's striking that the critique of the documents appeared on the Internet just hours after CBS aired them, and that the person claiming to be a document expert turned out to be an attorney with strong GOP connections who had no such credentials. How was this man able so quickly to produce his critique, and how did the story grow so quickly to overtake the basic questions about the president's own murky past performance? Did Rove's well-documented history of aggressive last-minute campaign ploys have anything to do with this episode? And why, despite all the questions, has Bush never offered a detailed accounting of his doings in those missing years? That's a news story no one yet has tackled. Without excusing serious errors on CBS's part, an even more important question remains: Why have we decided that the transgressions of a news organization -- that, at worst, overshot on a legitimate story - are more important than a thorough examination of the personal character of our Commander in Chief, presiding over a highly controversial war in Iraq and having no hesitation to expose others - including large numbers of Texas Guardsmen -- to mortal risk when he himself may have even failed to complete a safe military obligation of his own? RUSS BAKER  RUSS BAKER, THE NATION - For years, military buffs and retired officers have speculated about the real reasons that Bush left his unit two years before his flying obligation was up. Bush and his staff have muddied the issue by not providing a clear, comprehensive and consistent explanation of his departure from the unit. And, peculiarly, the President has not made himself available to describe in detail what did take place at that time. Instead, the White House has adopted a policy of offering obscure explanations by officials who clearly do not know the specifics of what went on, and the periodic release of large numbers of confusing or inconclusive documents--particularly at the start of weekends and holiday periods, when attention is elsewhere. In addition, the Bush camp has offered over the past few years a shifting panoply of explanations that subsequently failed to pass muster. One was that Bush had stopped flying his F-102A jet because it was being phased out (the plane continued to be used for at least another year). Another explanation was that he failed to take his physical exam in 1972 because his family doctor was unavailable. (Guard regulations require that physicals be conducted by doctors on the base, and would have been easily arranged either on a base in Texas or, after he left the state, in Alabama.) One of the difficulties in getting to the truth about what really took place during this period is the frequently expressed fear of retribution from the Bush organization. Many sources refuse to speak on the record, or even to have their knowledge communicated publicly in any way. One source who did publicly evince doubts about Bush's activities in 1972 was Dean Roome, who flew formations often with Bush and was his roommate for a time. "You wonder if you know who George Bush is," Roome told USA Today in a little-appreciated interview back in 2002. "I think he digressed after awhile," he said. "In the first half, he was gung-ho. Where George failed was to fulfill his obligation as a pilot. It was an irrational time in his life." Yet in subsequent years, Roome has revised his comments to a firm insistence that nothing out of the ordinary took place at that time, and after one interview he e-mailed me material raising questions about John Kerry's military career. Roome, who operates a curio shop in a Texas hamlet, told me that Bush aides, including communications adviser Karen Hughes, and even the President himself stay in touch with him. . . Bush has indicated that he departed from Ellington Air Force Base and his Guard unit because he had been offered an important employment opportunity with a political campaign in Alabama. The overwhelming evidence suggests, however, that the Alabama campaign was a convenient excuse for Bush to rapidly exit stage left from a Guard unit that found him and his behavior a growing problem. If that's not the case, now would be an excellent time for a President famed for his superlative memory to sit down and explain what really happened in that period.
WASHINGTON POST - Only one person has vivid recollections of serving with Bush at Dannelly field. John B. "Bill" Calhoun, 69 -- whose name was provided by a Republican ally of Bush's -- said he saw Bush sign in at the 187th eight to 10 times for about eight hours each from May to October 1972. But Calhoun remembers seeing Bush at Dannelly at times in mid-1972 when the White House acknowledges Bush was not pulling Guard duty in Alabama yet; his first drills were in October, according to the White House. White House press secretary Scott McClellan on Friday was at a loss to reconcile the discrepancy. MORE EVIDENCE BUSH CHEATED ON MILITARY OBLIGATION BOSTON GLOBE - In February, when the White House made public hundreds of pages of President Bush's military records, White House officials repeatedly insisted that the records prove that Bush fulfilled his military commitment in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War. But Bush fell well short of meeting his military obligation, a Globe reexamination of the records shows: Twice during his Guard service -- first when he joined in May 1968, and again before he transferred out of his unit in mid-1973 to attend Harvard Business School -- Bush signed documents pledging to meet training commitments or face a punitive call-up to active duty. He didn't meet the commitments, or face the punishment, the records show. MICHAEL DOBBS AND THOMAS B. EDSALL, WASHINGTON POST - President Bush failed to carry out a direct order from his superior in the Texas Air National Guard in May 1972 to undertake a medical examination that was necessary for him to remain a qualified pilot, according to documents made public yesterday. Documents obtained by the CBS News program "60 Minutes" shed new light on one of the most controversial episodes in Bush's military service, when he abruptly stopped flying and moved from Texas to Alabama to work on a political campaign. The documents include a memo from Bush's squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, ordering Bush "to be suspended from flight status for failure to perform" to U.S. Air Force and National Guard standards and failure to take his annual physical "as ordered.". . . According to "60 Minutes," Killian's personal files show that he ordered Bush "suspended from flight status" on Aug. 1, 1972. National Guard documents already released by the White House and the Pentagon show that Bush was suspended from flight status on that day for "failure to accomplish annual medical examination" but do not mention his alleged failure to comply with National Guard and Air Force standards. In another "memo
to file," dated Aug. 18, 1973, Killian complained that he
was under pressure from his superior, Col. Walter B. "Buck"
Staudt, to "sugar coat" Bush's officer evaluations.
"I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job,"
he wrote in a memo titled "CYA." "I will not rate."
RECOVERED HISTORY
JACKSON BAKER, MEMPHIS FLYER - Two members of the Air National Guard unit that President George W. Bush allegedly served with as a young Guard flyer in 1972 had been told to expect him and were on the lookout for him. He never showed, however; of that both Bob Mintz and Paul Bishop are certain... Recalls Memphian Mintz, now 62: "I remember that I heard someone was coming to drill with us from Texas. And it was implied that it was somebody with political influence. I was a young bachelor then. I was looking for somebody to prowl around with." But, says Mintz, that "somebody" -- better known to the world now as the president of the United States -- never showed up at Dannelly in 1972. Nor in 1973, nor at any time that Mintz, a Fedex pilot now and an Eastern Airlines pilot then, when he was a reserve first lieutenant at Dannelly, can remember. "And I was looking for him," repeated Mintz, who said that he assumed that Bush "changed his mind and went somewhere else" to do his substitute drill. It was not "somewhere else," however, but the 187th Air National Guard Tactical squadron at Dannelly to which the young Texas flyer had requested transfer from his regular Texas unit – the reason being Bush's wish to work in Alabama on the ultimately unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign of family friend Winton "Red" Blount. It is the 187th, Mintz's unit, which was cited, during the 2000 presidential campaign, as the place where Bush completed his military obligation. And it is the 187th that the White House continues to contend that Bush belonged to – as recently as this week, when presidential spokesman Scott McClellan released payroll records and, later, evidence suggesting that Bush's dental records might be on file at Dannelly. "There's no way we wouldn't have noticed a strange rooster in the hen house, especially since we were looking for him," insists Mintz... "I talked to one of my buddies the other day and asked if he could remember Bush at drill at any time, and he said, 'Naw, ol' George wasn't there. And he wasn't at the Pit, either.'" The "Pit" was The Snake Pit, a nearby bistro where the squadron's pilots would gather for frequent after-hours revelry. And the buddy was Bishop, then a lieutenant at Dannelly and now a pilot for Kalitta, a charter airline that in recent months has been flying war materiel into the Iraq Theater of Operations. "I never saw hide nor hair of Mr. Bush," confirms Bishop, who now lives in Goldsboro, N.C., is a veteran of Gulf War I and, as a Kalitta pilot, has himself flown frequent supply missions into military facilities at Kuwait. "In fact," he quips, mindful of the current political frame of reference, "I saw more of Al Sharpton at the base than I did of George W. Bush." WHAT WAS UNDER THAT BLACK INK? ELISABETH BUMILLER, NY TIMES - "Have you ever been arrested, indicted or convicted for any violation of civil or military law?" a form in President Bush's National Guard file asks. But the answer in the publicly released form, published on Thursday in USA Today, is blacked out, suggesting the worst. So on Thursday, Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, who has accused the Democrats of "trolling for trash" in the president's record, did not even wait for anyone to ask. "Let me tell you what was in that blacked-out part," Mr. McClellan told reporters traveling with the president on Air Force One. He was brandishing a clean copy of the very same form. Behind the black ink, Mr. McClellan said, was a misdemeanor in New Haven in December 1966, a charge that was dismissed. Mr. Bush, he said, had stolen a wreath while a student at Yale in what has become a widely known prank. Mr. McClellan said Mr. Bush's form also listed two speeding tickets, in July and August of 1964 in Houston traffic court, with $10 fines, and two collisions, in July and August of 1962, also in Houston traffic court, with $25 fines. "I'm just amazed by the kinds of conspiracy theories that some have chosen to pursue," Mr. McClellan said. But reporters were now on to a new conspiracy theory. "Just to keep trolling for a moment," a reporter began, then questioned why such minor infractions were blacked out in the first place. Mr. McClellan blamed the National Guard, saying that when government agencies release information "there are privacy issues involved." PROGRESSIVE SOUTHERNER - Those who encountered Bush in Alabama remember him as an affable social drinker who acted younger than his 26 years. Referred to as George Bush, Jr. by newspapers in those days, sources say he also tended to show up late every day, around noon or one, at Blount's campaign headquarters in Montgomery. They say Bush would prop his cowboy boots on a desk and brag about how much he drank the night before. They also remember Bush's stories about how the New Haven, Connecticut police always let him go, after he told them his name, when they stopped him "all the time" for driving drunk as a student at Yale in the late 1960s. Bush told this story to others working in the campaign "what seemed like a hundred times," says Red Blount's nephew C. Murphy Archibald, now an attorney in Charlotte, N.C., who also worked on the Blount campaign and said he had "vivid memories" of that time. "He would laugh uproariously as though there was something funny about this. To me, that was pretty memorable, because here he is, a number of years out of college, talking about this to people he doesn't know," Archibald said. "He just struck me as a guy who really had an idea of himself as very much a child of privilege, that he wasn't operating by the same rules." During this period Bush often socialized with the young ladies of Huntington College, located in the Old Cloverdale historic neighborhood where he stayed. Bush even dated Nixon's daughter Tricia in the early 1970s, according to newspaper accounts. Bush was described as "young and personable" by the Montgomery Independent society columnist, and seen dancing at the Whitley Hotel on election night November 7 with "the blonde, pretty Emily Marks." During the 2000 campaign, the Boston Globe named Marks as one of Bush's former girlfriends. But she and several other women who dated him during that time refused to say anything bad on the record about Bush, now a sitting president. Many of those who came into close contact with Bush say he liked to drink beer and Jim Beam whiskey, and to eat fist-fulls of peanuts, and Executive burgers, at the Cloverdale Grill. They also say he liked to sneak out back for a joint of marijuana or into the head for a line of cocaine. The newspapers that year are full of stories about the scourge of cocaine from Vietnam and China, much of it imported by the French. According to Cathy Donelson, a daughter of old Montgomery but one of the toughest investigative reporters to work for newspapers in Alabama over the years, the 1960s came to Old Cloverdale in the early 1970s about the time of Bush's arrival. "We did a lot of drugs in those days," she said. "The 1970s are a blur.". . . Winton Bount's son Tom, an accomplished architect who designed the Shakespeare Festival Theater in Montgomery, remembers well his encounter with Bush. He recently co-produced and underwrote a telling movie called The Trip, set in the period from 1973 to the early 1980s, about a young gay Texan and his conservative Republican lover. The son known as "Tommy" said he ended up in the same car with Bush, with Bush driving, on election night. "He was an attractive person, kind of a 'frat boy,'" Blount said. "I didn't like him." He remembers thinking to himself, "This guy thinks he is such a cuntsman, God's gift to women," he said. "He was all duded up in his cowboy boots. It was sort of annoying seeing all these people who thought they were hot shit just because they were from Texas." Bush also made an impression on the "Blue-Haired Platoon," a group of older Republican Women working for Blount. Behind his back they called him "the Texas soufflé," Archibald said, because he was "all puffed up and full of hot air." SOURCES SAYS 'CLEANSING' OF BUSH MILITARY FILES WAS DISCUSSED DAVE MONIZ AND JIM DRINKARD, USA TODAY - As Texas Gov. George W. Bush prepared to run for president in the late 1990s, top-ranking Texas National Guard officers and Bush advisers discussed ways to limit the release of potentially embarrassing details from Bush's military records, a former senior officer of the Texas Guard said Wednesday A second former Texas Guard official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, was told by a participant that commanders and Bush advisers were particularly worried about mentions in the records of arrests of Bush before he joined the National Guard in 1968, the second official said. Bill Burkett, then a top adviser to the state Guard commander, said he overheard conversations in which superiors discussed "cleansing" the file of damaging information. The White House dismissed Burkett's charge Wednesday. It is an "outrageously false statement," said White House communications director Dan Bartlett, who handled the records in the late 1990s as an aide to Gov. Bush. Administration officials dismiss Burkett as a disgruntled former Guardsman who had a falling-out with his superiors. Two forms in Bush's publicly released military files — his enlistment application and a background check — contain blacked-out entries in response to questions about arrests or convictions. Bush acknowledged in biographies published in 1999 that he was arrested twice before he enlisted in the Air National Guard: once for stealing a wreath and another time for rowdiness at a Yale-Princeton football game. The nature of what was blacked out in Bush's records is important because certain legal problems, such as drug or alcohol violations, could have been a basis for denying an applicant entry into the Guard or pilot training. Admission to the Guard and to pilot school was highly competitive at that time, the height of the Vietnam War. The National Guard cited privacy as the reason for blacking out answers. The full, unmarked records have never been released. Bartlett did not respond Wednesday to a request to release the records with nothing blacked out, which Bush could do as the subject of the records. Burkett says that the state Guard commander, Maj. Gen. Daniel James III, discussed "cleansing" Bush's military files of embarrassing or incriminating documents in the summer of 1997. At the time, Burkett was a lieutenant colonel and a chief adviser to James. He says he was just outside James' open office door when his boss discussed the records on a speakerphone with Joe Allbaugh, who was then Gov. Bush's chief of staff. In Burkett's account, Allbaugh told James that Bush's press secretary, Karen Hughes, was preparing a biography and needed information on Bush's military service. In an interview, Burkett said he recalled Allbaugh's words: "We certainly don't want anything that is embarrassing in there." Burkett said he immediately told two other officers about the conversation and noted it in a daily journal he kept. The two officers, George Conn and Dennis Adams, confirmed to USA TODAY in 2002 that Burkett told them of the conversation within days. Soon afterward, there was a series of meetings of top commanders at Texas Guard headquarters at Camp Mabry. Bush's records were carried between the base archives and the headquarters building, according to Burkett and the second Guard official, who was there. LOIS ROMANO AND MIKE ALLEN WASHINGTON POST - The White House released yesterday summaries of President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service records and pay documents, which the president's spokesman said demonstrate that Bush fulfilled his Vietnam War-era military obligations in the early '70s. The documents indicate that Bush performed Guard service in the fall of 1972 and in early 1973, and show that he was paid for work during the period that Democrats have alleged Bush shirked his service . . . National Guard members receive points for the times they appear for drills and other duty. The documents released yesterday were annual summaries of the points Bush earned. The typed documents are in contrast to the other documents in Bush's personnel file, which offer handwritten, detailed pages of dates of service in the earlier years. No handwritten documents of Bush's annual points have ever surfaced for May 1972 through May 1973. . . The gap in Bush's records coincides with a period in his life that he has referred to as his "nomadic" years. As Bush's father was considering a job offer in late 1972 from Richard M. Nixon to become chairman of the Republican National Committee, the younger Bush stayed with his parents in Washington for the holidays. In a now famous incident, he took his then-16-year-old brother, Marvin, out drinking and ran over a neighbor's garbage cans on the way home; and when confronted by his father, he challenged him to go "mano a mano" outside. [The Boston Globe broke this story during the 2000 campaign, but other than the NY Times, the major media paid little attention] BOSTON GLOBE - A detailed Globe examination of the records in 2000 unearthed official reports by Bush's Guard commanders that they had not seen him for a year. There was also no evidence that Bush had done part of his Guard service in Alabama, as he has claimed. Bush's Guard appointment, made possible by family connections, was cut short when Bush was allowed to leave his Houston Guard unit eight months early to attend Harvard Business School. Bush received an honorable discharge in 1973. The records contain no indication that Bush's commanding officers, one of them a friend, ever accused him of shirking his duty. In an interview yesterday, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, asserted that Bush "fulfilled his military requirements." Bartlett acknowledged that Bush's "irregular civilian work schedule could have put strains on when he served, when he performed his duty.". . . Still, according to the records and interviews in 2000, Bush's attendance record in the Guard was highly unusual: Although he was trained as a fighter pilot, Bush ceased flying in April 1972, little more than two years after he finished flight school and two years before his six-year enlistment was to end, when he was allowed to transfer to an Alabama Air Guard unit. The records contain no evidence that Bush performed any military duty in Alabama. His Alabama unit commander, in an interview, said Bush never appeared for duty. In August 1972, Bush was suspended from flight status for failing to take his annual flight physical. In May 1973, Bush's two superior officers in Houston wrote that they could not perform his annual evaluation, because he had "not been observed at this unit" during the preceding 12 months. The two officers, one of them a friend of Bush and both now dead, wrote that they believed Bush had been fulfilling his commitment at the Alabama unit. Two other officers, in interviews, offered a similar account of Bush's absence, saying they had assumed Bush completed his service in Alabama. Bush's official record of service, which is supposed to contain an account of his duty attendance for each year of service, shows no such attendance after May 1972. In unit records, however, there are documents showing that Bush was ordered to a flurry of drills -- over 36 days -- in the late spring and summer of 1973. He was discharged Oct. 1, 1973, eight months before his six-year commitment ended. Through Bartlett, Bush insisted in 2000 that he had indeed attended military drills while he was in Alabama during 1972 and in 1973 after returning to his Houston base. At the time, Bartlett said Bush did not recall what duties he performed during that period. CECIL ADAMS - A few months after the 2000 election, former Bill Clinton adviser Paul Begala said he'd done a Nexis search and found 13,641 stories about Clinton's alleged draft dodging versus 49 about George W. Bush's military record. Why the disparity? We'll get to that. First the basics: Yes, it's true, Bush didn't report to his guard unit for an extended period--17 months, by one account. . . Here's the story as generally agreed upon: In January 1968, with the Vietnam war in full swing, Bush was due to graduate from Yale. Knowing he'd soon be eligible for the draft, he took an air force officers' test hoping to secure a billet with the Texas Air National Guard, which would allow him to do his military service at home. Bush didn't do particularly well on the test--on the pilot aptitude section, he scored in the 25th percentile, the lowest possible passing grade. But Bush's father, George H.W., was then a U.S. congressman from Houston, and strings were pulled. The younger Bush vaulted to the head of a long waiting list--a year and a half long, by some estimates--and in May of '68 he was inducted into the guard. By all accounts Bush was an excellent pilot, but apparently his enthusiasm cooled. In 1972, four years into his six-year guard commitment, he was asked to work for the campaign of Bush family friend Winton Blount, who was running for the U.S. Senate in Alabama. In May Bush requested a transfer to an Alabama Air National Guard unit with no planes and minimal duties. Bush's immediate superiors approved the transfer, but higher-ups said no. The matter was delayed for months. In August Bush missed his annual flight physical and was grounded. (Some have speculated that he was worried about failing a drug test - he Pentagon had instituted random screening in April.) In September he was ordered to report to a different unit of the Alabama guard, the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group in Montgomery. Bush says he did so, but his nominal superiors say they never saw the guy, there's no documentation he ever showed up, and not one of the six or seven hundred soldiers then in the unit has stepped forward to corroborate Bush's story. After the November election Bush returned to Texas, but apparently didn't notify his old Texas guard unit for quite a while, if ever. The Boston Globe initially reported that he started putting in some serious duty time in May, June, and July of 1973 to make up for what he'd missed. But according to a piece in the New Republic, there's no evidence Bush did even that. Whatever the case, even though his superiors knew he'd blown off his duties, they never disciplined him. (No one's ever been shot at dawn for missing a weekend guard drill, but policy at the time was to put shirkers on active duty.) Indeed, when Bush decided to go to business school at Harvard in the fall of 1973, he requested and got an honorable discharge - eight months before his service was scheduled to end. . . Why wasn't he called on it in a serious way during the 2000 election? Probably because Democrats figured they'd get Clinton's draft-dodging thing thrown back at them TALION - The facts about George W. Bush military record: On September 29, 1972 Air National Guard orders "suspending 1st Lt. George W. Bush from flying status are confirmed. . . Reason for Suspension: Failure to accomplish annual medical exam." - Bush's initial temporary transfer to Alabama was denied because "an obligated Reservist can be assigned to a specific Ready Reserve position only. Therefore, he is ineligible for assignment to an Air Reserve Squadron." Nonetheless, Bush reapplied, was accepted by the commander of the mail unit in Alabama, and moved to Alabama to work on a Senate campaign, instead of completing his military duties. He claims no one exerted any influence. - According to a Boston Globe Story on May 23, 2000, "In his final 18 months of military service in 1972 and 1973, Bush did not fly at all. And for much of that time, Bush was all but unaccounted for. For a full year, there is no record that he showed up for the periodic drills required of part-time guardsmen. . . From May to November 1972, Bush was in Alabama working in a US Senate campaign, and was required to attend drills at an Air National Guard unit in Montgomery. But there is no evidence in his record that he did so. And William Turnipseed, the retired general who commanded the Alabama unit back then, said in an interview last week that Bush never appeared for duty there. - The tattered piece of attendance record (which lists no months, years, or last name) which the Bush campaign presented as evidence of attending Air National Guard training is not even from the Air National Guard. This incomplete scrap of paper is from the Air Force Reserve punishment unit, not the Air National Guard. . . - In the fall of 1973, as an automatic disciplinary action, Bush was reassigned to the Obligated Reserve Section in Denver, because he disobeyed orders to show up for a mandatory flight physical and therefore was unable to fulfill the last two years of his six-year obligation as an Air National Guard jet fighter pilot. . . MUCH MORE, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPIES
BUSH MAKES UP FOR TIME NOT SERVED RESPONSE TO AN INQUIRY CONCERNING BUSH'S PARTICIPAITON FROM AIR FORCE HQ
THE BUSH AWOL STORY CONT'D WE HAVE BEEN among those who have reported on George Bush having been effectively - albeit perhaps not legally - AWOL during some of his Air National Guard career. The matter resurfaced because of Michael Moore's incorrect description of Bush as a 'deserter.' Conservatives have come to Bush's defense, citing NY Times coverage which in some ways contradicted Boston Globe coverage. But after the NY Times story appeared, the Globe reiterated the bulk of its account. What makes this all the more interesting is the Times owns the Globe. Here are relevant clips: JO THOMAS, NY TIMES, 2000 - Two Democratic senators today called on Gov. George W. Bush to release his full military record to resolve doubts raised by a newspaper about whether he reported for required drills when he was in the Air National Guard in 1972 and 1973. But a review of records by The New York Times indicated that some of those concerns may be unfounded. Documents reviewed by The Times showed that Mr. Bush served in at least 9 of the 17 months in question. . . A review by The Times showed that after a seven-month gap, he appeared for duty in late November 1972 at least through July 1973. Mr. Bush was assigned to the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston, from November 1969, last flying there on April 16, 1972. In a report dated May 26, 1972, his commander, Maj. William D. Harris Jr., said Mr. Bush had "recently accepted the position as campaign manager for a candidate for the United States Senate." Mr. Bush went to work for Winton M. Blount a few days after Mr. Blount won the Republican primary in Alabama on May 2, 1972. From that time until after the election that November, Mr. Bush did not appear for duty, even after being told to report for training with an Alabama unit in October and November. Mr. Bartlett said Mr. Bush had been too busy with the campaign to report in those months but made up the time later. On Sept. 5, 1972, Mr. Bush asked his Texas Air National Guard superiors for assignment to the 187th Tactical Recon Group in Montgomery "for the months of September, October and November." Capt. Kenneth K. Lott, chief of the personnel branch of the 187th Tactical Recon Group, told the Texas commanders that training in September had already occurred but that more training was scheduled for Oct. 7 and 8 and Nov. 4 and 5. But Mr. Bartlett said Mr. Bush did not serve on those dates because he was involved in the Senate campaign, but he made up those dates later. . . Mr. Bartlett pointed to a document in Mr. Bush's military records that showed credit for four days of duty ending Nov. 29 and for eight days ending Dec. 14, 1972, and, after he moved back to Houston, on dates in January, April and May. The May dates correlated with orders sent to Mr. Bush at his Houston apartment on April 23, 1973, in which Sgt. Billy B. Lamar told Mr. Bush to report for active duty on May 1-3 and May 8-10. Another document showed that Mr. Bush served at various times from May 29, 1973, through July 30, 1973, a period of time questioned by The Globe. JO THOMAS, NY TIMES, JULY 22, 2000 - When Mr. Bush went to work on the campaign he was still obligated to serve in the National Guard, and accordingly he sought a transfer to Alabama. His original request, to serve with the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron in Montgomery, was rejected because the unit would not meet his military obligation. He requested another assignment in July, and the Texas Air National Guard recommended letting him serve with another Montgomery group, the 187th Tactical Recon Group, from September to November 1972. On Sept. 15, 1972, the head of personnel for that unit wrote: "Lieutenant Bush should report to Lt. Col. William Turnipseed, DCO, to perform equivalent training." Questions about Mr. Bush's military service arose in May when The Boston Globe quoted Mr. Turnipseed, who retired as a general, as saying Mr. Bush never appeared for duty. In a recent interview, the general took a tiny step back, saying, "I don't think he did, but I wouldn't stake my life on it. I think I would have remembered him. The chances are 99 percent he didn't." In an interview, Mr. Bush disagreed. "I was there. I know this guy was quoted as saying I wasn't, but I was there." National Guard records provided by the Guard and by the Bush campaign indicate he did serve on Nov. 29, 1972, after the election. These records also show a gap in service from that time to the previous May. Mr. Bush says he made up for the lost time in subsequent months, and guard records show he received credit for having performed all the required service. [Then some months later came this story in which the Globe did not back down] WALTER V. ROBINSON, BOSTON GLOBE, OCTOBER 31, 2000 - Belatedly, [Democrats] are calling attention to misleading claims Bush and his campaign have made about his Vietnam-era service as a fighter pilot with the Texas Air National Guard, and to documents that contradict Bush's insistence that he attended required drills in Alabama and Texas in 1972 and 1973. Five months after the Globe first reported those discrepancies, Bush's biography on his presidential campaign Web site remains unchanged, stating that he served as a pilot in the Texas Guard from 1968 to 1973. In fact, Bush only flew with the 111th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Ellington Field in Houston from June 1970 until April 1972. That month he ceased flying altogether, two years before his military commitment ended, an unusual step that has left some veteran fighter pilots puzzled. In Alabama, a group of Vietnam veterans recently offered a $1,000 reward for anyone who can verify Bush's claim that he performed service at a Montgomery air guard unit in 1972, when Bush was temporarily in Alabama working on a political campaign. So far, no one has come forward. The reward is now $3,500. What's more, a Bush campaign spokesman acknowledged last week that he knows of no witnesses who can attest to Bush's attendance at drills after he returned to Houston in late 1972 and before his early release from the Guard in September 1973. There is strong evidence that Bush performed no military service, as was required, when he moved from Houston to Alabama to work on a US Senate campaign from May to November 1972. There are no records of any service and the commanding officer of the unit Bush was assigned to said he never saw him. During Bush's Alabama sojourn, he was suspended from flight duty for not taking his annual flight physical. . . Major Thomas A. Deall, a spokesman for the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver, said last week that officials there now believe that after looking at Bush's records, he met minimum drill requirements before his discharge. Still, as the Globe reported in May, two documents and the recollections of officers who said they believe that Bush did not return to his Houston base after leaving for Alabama raise questions about whether Bush performed any duty between April 1972 and September 1973, the month Bush entered Harvard Business School. . . Jesse Brown, the former Veterans Affairs secretary who was seriously wounded while serving as a Marine in Vietnam, said he is irritated that Bush's military service lapses have not become part of the campaign debate. "It goes right to the heart of the character issue," Brown said. "If you served on active duty during that time, you knew that people went into the Guard and Reserves so they wouldn't have to put their asses on the line. But once they made that decision, they should honor the obligation, do their duty and do it well. Bush did not.". . . Reviewing the outstanding questions: How long did Bush fly with the 111th? In his autobiography, "A Charge to Keep," Bush said he flew with his unit for "several years" after finishing flight training in June 1970. His campaign biography states that he flew with the unit until he won release from the service in September 1973, nine months early, for graduate school. Neither assertion is true. Bush flew with the 111th for 22 months, until April 1972, and never flew again. Bartlett said last week that he could say unequivocally that Bush was not grounded by his superiors. Asked that question last July, Bartlett, after conferring with Bush, was more equivocal: He said Bush could not recall ever being grounded. What happened to 1st Lieutenant Bush after April 1972? Bush and his campaign have said that he performed "alternative" duty at the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron in Montgomery from May to November 1972, while he was working on a Senate race in Alabama. Such duty was normal for Guardsmen who were temporarily away from their home units. But Bush's own records contradict that assertion. First, with the approval of his superiors, Bush in May 1972 sought a permanent transfer to a postal unit in Alabama that didn't require weekend drills or active duty. Guard headquarters overruled that decision. Bush did not do any drills from May through September 1972. In July 1972, Bush failed to take his annual flight physical. In August, National Guard headquarters suspended him from flying status. Last year, the Bush campaign erroneously claimed that Bush did not take the physical because his personal physician was in Houston. In fact, only Air Force flight surgeons can give annual flight physicals to pilots. Bush could have taken the exam at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery. In September 1972, Bush won approval to do temporary "alternative" training at the 187th Squadron in Montgomery. He was cleared to attend weekend drills in October and November. But two of the 187th's officers said Bush never appeared. "I'm dead-certain he didn't show up," said the unit's commander, retired Brigadier General William Turnipseed. Bush, who has declined requests for an interview on the issue, has said he did appear, though he does not recall what he did. There are no records in his file to show that he did any training in Alabama. What happened when Bush returned to Houston in late 1972? Bush and his spokesman have said that Bush did not fly again because he planned to go to graduate school. Also, they say that as the unit was upgrading to a newer fighter, the F-101, it made little sense for the Guard to retrain him for that jet. In fact, the unit flew the F-102 for a year after Bush left the service. Bush has said he performed administrative duties with the 111th's parent unit, the 147th Fighter Group, though Bartlett has said Bush cannot recall what those duties were. There is other evidence that Bush's attendance was so inconsistent that his commanders did not know he had returned to the Houston base. On May 2, 1972, Bush's two immediate superiors at the 111th, one of them a friend, signed a document stating that they could not perform his annual officer efficiency report for the period of May 1, 1972, to April 30, 1973, because Bush "has not been observed at this unit during the period of this report" and "has been performing equivalent training" at the Montgomery unit. The document is dated a day after Bush was supposed to have done duty in the unit. Both men have since died. The official record that chronologically lists Bush's service includes no evidence of service between May 1972 and October 1, 1973, the official date of his discharge. BUSH OFFICIAL TRIED TO GAG PARK SERVICE POLICE CHIEF ASSOCIATED PRESS - The National Park Service offered not to press charges against U.S. Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers in exchange for a gag order, Chief Chambers' attorney confirmed yesterday. The offer was made Dec. 12, six days before the Park Service announced it wanted to fire Chief Chambers. It was first reported on the Web site of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a group that supports her. A PEER spokesman said the information came from U.S. Senate employees briefed on a meeting between Chief Chambers and Don Murphy, the Park Service's deputy director. Chief Chambers' attorney, Peter Noone, acknowledged that Chief Chambers and Mr. Murphy met. Although he declined to characterize the meeting, Mr. Noone confirmed the information posted on the PEER Web site. . . According to PEER, Mr. Murphy offered not to press charges of releasing sensitive information, lobbying, insubordination and breaking the chain of command. In return, Chief Chambers was asked not to speak with the media or Congress without prior approval. Chief Chambers rejected the offer because she was concerned that micro-management and interference would make her and the police force ineffective, said Jeff Ruch, PEER's executive director. Six days later, Park Service officials told her they planned to fire her. "This means that the charges against her were trumped up to apply political pressure," Mr. Ruch said. "First they offered not to press them, then they said the charges were so serious that the only solution is termination." WOMAN PARK POLICE CHIEF SUBJECTED TO POLITICAL HARASSMENT AND SABOTAGE DAVID A. FAHRENTHOLD WASHINGTON POST - An attorney for U.S. Park Police Chief Teresa C. Chambers has accused the National Park Service of acting illegally to fire her and for the first time alleged publicly that she faced other adversity during her 22-month tenure, including a battle with "internal terrorists" who attempted to discredit her. In a letter to the Interior Department, dated Friday, lawyer Peter H. Noone provided the most comprehensive defense yet of Chambers, who faces dismissal for talking about security procedures and budget issues in an interview with The Washington Post. She also faces allegations of insubordination involving unrelated incidents. Although most of the 56-page letter deals with the recent controversy over Chambers's comments to the media, the letter says she and her command team faced internal opposition that had not come to the public's attention. The letter says "internal terrorists," or detractors, committed a series of "petty acts" against Chambers, an outsider who became the first female chief in the history of the agency, and other executives who joined her team. Noone says in the letter: "The acts of the critics included breaking into the Chief's office; sabotaging her computer by deleting over 400 future calendar entries, a finding corroborated by IT experts; theft of a personal item of property; placing nails under tires; placing used condoms on and around assigned vehicles; setting the temperature on personally-owned refrigerators to the highest setting to freeze and burst cans; and, most recently, pepper spraying an office door while the Deputy Chief was conducting business in the same office." The letter continues: "The actions of the antagonists were not only upsetting to the Chief and to the other victims, but were, in the Chief's opinion, intended to disrupt and upset the mission of the Chief and her staff so that the Chief would either fail or quit." RIGHT WING PARK SERVICE OFFICIAL TRIES TO FIRE U.S. PARK POLICE CHIEF FOR TELLING TRUTH, BANS PHOTOS OF GAY PROTESTS ON MALL, INSTALLS RELIGIOUS ICONS AT GRAND CANYON, SELLS CREATIONIST BOOK AT PARK STORE 365 GAY - All images of gay gatherings at national sites, including the Millennium March on the Washington Mall have been ordered removed from videotapes that have been shown at the Lincoln Memorial since 1995 according to a civil service group. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says that the directive came from National Parks Service Deputy Director Donald Murphy. Murphy is said to have been concerned about pictures in the video that showed same-sex couples kissing and holding hands after conservative groups complained. The Millennium March held in 2000 to bring attention to LGBT civil rights issues drew tens of thousands of gays and their supporters to the mall for one of the biggest demonstrations since the civil rights and anti-war marches of the 1960s. Also ordered cut from the tape were scenes of abortion rights demonstrations at the memorial, and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations "because it implies that Lincoln would have supported homosexual and abortion rights as well as feminism." In their place, the Park Service is inserting scenes of the Christian group Promise Keepers and pro-Gulf War demonstrators though these events did not take place at the Memorial in what Murphy calls a "more balanced" version. "The Park Service leadership now caters exclusively to conservative Christian fundamentalist groups," stated PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch. "The Bush Administration appears to be sponsoring a program of Faith-Based Parks." JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, COUNTERPUNCH - This autumn Donald Murphy, deputy director of the National Park Service, ordered three bronze plaques featuring quotes from Psalms 68:4, 66:4 and 104:24 placed on viewing platforms on the south rim of the [Grand] Canyon. The plaques were made and donated by the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary in Phoenix, who live in a convent called Cannan in the Desert. The convent was founded in 1963 by Mother Basilea, who visited the Sinai where said said she conversed with the Supreme Deity about the moral decline of the western world. The nuns' website warns that "avalanche of moral decay is upon us... our society is disintegrating." As evidence, the nuns point to the removal of Judge Roy Moore's monument to the 10 Commandments in the lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court and to the appearance of the Dalai Lama at the National Cathedral-"another illustration of how God's commandments are pushed aside, step by step. May Jesus help us and guard our hearts!" At the urging of the sisters, Murphy overturned a decision to ban the plaques by the Park's superintendent, who contended the religious messages violated the US Constitution. That's not all. Now, after soaking in the grandeur of the canyon, visitors can retire to the Park bookstore where they can browse through the diaries of John Wesley Powell, Edward Abbey's Down the River, historian Stephen Pyne's excellent How the Canyon Became Grand and numerous volumes on the geology of the canyon. . . But starting this summer the Park's bookstore began offering a volume titled The Grand Canyon: A Different View. The view is indeed different. This book of lavish photographs and essays presents the creationist account of the origins of the great canyon of the Colorado River. The book is edited by Tom Vail, a river guide, who offers Christian float trips through the canyon. "For years, as a Colorado River guide I told people how the Grand Canyon was formed over the evolutionary time scale of millions of years," Vail writes in the introduction to the book. "Then I met the Lord. Now, I have "a different view" of the Canyon, which, according to a biblical time scale, can't possibly be more than about a few thousand years old." One of the contributors is creation "scientist" Dr. Gary Parker who observes: "Where did the Grand Canyon itself come from? The Flood may have stacked the rock like a giant layer cake, but what cut the cake? One thing is sure: the Colorado River did not do it." Earlier this year, the Bush administration prevented park rangers from publishing a rebuttal to the book for use by interpretive staff and seasonal employees who are often confronted during tours by creationist zealots. DAVID A. FAHRENTHOLD WASHINGTON POST - U.S. Park Police Chief Teresa C. Chambers, who was placed on leave after stating publicly that her department was understaffed, was formally notified yesterday that the National Park Service intends to fire her. . . Chambers is accused, among other allegations, of improperly lobbying Congress and disclosing secret budget details through her public comments. Peter Noone, Chambers's attorney, said she will defend herself by citing her First Amendment rights as well as the federal Whistleblower Protection Act. Noone said Chambers is not interested in any settlement that requires her to quit. . . Yesterday, experts on federal personnel law said that Chambers might have a strong defense. If she spoke out to warn the public about potential dangers to health or safety, they said, she would be afforded legal protection. "It seems like a big overreaction. It seems like it puts them in jeopardy of being accused of . . . retaliating against a whistleblower," said Elaine Kaplan, a former head of the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which handles whistleblower cases. Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, said he knows of no other government official who has been punished so severely for publicly noting a need for more resources. "That's almost coffee talk in Washington, D.C.," said Devine, whose group assists whistleblowers. WTOP, DC - Police unions are vowing to battle on behalf of U.S. Park Police Chief Theresa Chambers - who could lose her job by Christmas. Jeff Capps, with the Park Police FOP says the National Park Service should be ashamed for trying to force Chambers to leave. "Any investigator, I think would say to me, this just looks like bureaucratic politics of Washington's finest. And it's a witch hunt.". . . Jeff Capps, the former FOP chairman for the Park Police, said Park Service Director Fran Minella spoke publicly in August about her disappointment with President Bush's budget and made an appeal for help for the Statue of Liberty. "If you're going to sanction our chief, I think that sanction needs to go up as well as down," said Capps. US PARK RANGERS FOP - The United States Park Ranger Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police is strongly opposed to the suspension and pending punishment of the current head of the US Park Police, Chief Teresa Chambers", said Executive Director Randall Kendrick. "What Chief Chambers has stated is common knowledge throughout the National Park Service. The US Park Police, as well as the commissioned US Park Rangers are woefully understaffed for the job they are called upon to perform, especially after 9/11", he continued. As a matter of fact, several recent professional studies of law enforcement in the NPS, such as Booz-Allen, the IACP, and the Hon. Earl Devaney, Inspector General of the Dept of Interior, and others have time and again pointed out the misplaced priorities of this agency. . . According to the Dept Of Justice Bureau Of Statistics, the NPS suffers by far the worst record of having its officers killed or injured by assaults in the line of duty of any federal law enforcement agency. CHIEF TERESA CHAMBERS - Last Friday, December 5, 2003, my world and my identity fell apart. Without explanation -- other than my "conduct" was being "reviewed" -- I was placed on administrative leave and stripped of my police powers. I was forced by Deputy Director Don Murphy to relinquish on the spot my firearm, badges, and credentials. The person to whom I was mandated to turn over the property was a NPS Special Agent. Two armed special agents were stationed outside Murphy's door, and two were posted at what I refer to as "ceremonial parade rest" behind him. I was summoned to his office on the pretense that the Director and he wanted to meet with me and the USPP second in command, Assistant Chief Ben Holmes, about "general USPP issues." The Director was not present. In fact, she was hidden away in another wing until I was disarmed and had left Murphy's office. Two of the special agents were then ordered to escort me back to headquarters to turn over other property, including cell phones, pager, computer, Blackberry, keys, identification cards, and the like. Murphy and a representative of the Solicitor's Office refused to answer my questions regarding what they were investigating or what I was alleged to have done. My purpose in writing is not to gain sympathy but to merely praise the professionalism of the four special agents who were given the unpleasant assignment of being there on December 5. The Special Agent in Charge stated, with tears in her eyes and in front of Murphy and while she was taking possession of my weapon, "This isn't right. I am so sorry." I quickly responded as I touched her arm gently, "You are not the bad guy here." All four special agents had a look of sorrow and unease. They were models of professionalism and sensitivity. The two who were required to escort me back to headquarters gave me lots of space to interact with USPP employees on the way into the building and patiently waited while I gathered up the required items to relinquish. Several times, they expressed their apologies and empathy for what they saw as an unjust action. In fact, one described my behavior in Murphy's office as a "class act.". . MEET CHRIS COX: TO SECURITIES
OVERSIGHT AS BOLTON IS TO THE U.N. PROGRESS REPORT - Meet Chris Cox, the man who helped produce the Enron scandal. Orange County Weekly reported that "Cox, as part of conservative Republicans' so-called Contract With America, spearheaded efforts to torpedo protections for corporate investors and shield companies -- like Enron -- and their accountants -- like Arthur Andersen -- from investor lawsuits." Cox's sustained effort to provide protections to corporate bad actors was successful; the nation's economy was not. Moreover, Cox pushed his securities reform bill through Congress at the same time he was a named defendant in two lawsuits for securities fraud. Cox's conduct raises serious questions about his ethical suitability for the job. For the last two-and-half years, outgoing SEC Chairman William Donaldson has worked to repair the damage Cox helped produce. But Cox remains committed to his ideological agenda, and, should he be confirmed, is ready to take the country back into the Enron era. Cox claimed on the floor of the House in 1995 that securities law was "a legal torture chamber ... more suitable to the pages of Charles Dickens' 'Bleak House' than a nation dedicated to equal justice under law." Cox's efforts to weaken protections for investors culminated in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which provided extensive legal protection to corporate executives, accountants and lawyers who made misleading statements. The bill was enacted into law over President Clinton's veto "after heavy lobbying from Andersen [and] the rest of the accounting industry." Duke University Law Professor James Cox (no relation) called the law "the ultimate in special-interest legislation." Barbara Roper, director of investor protection at the Consumer Federation of America, said Chris Cox's law "made it not only possible but likely that something like Enron would occur." According to OC Weekly, "independent legal analyses and securities lawyers agree" that Cox's bill "significantly raised the bar at several points in the litigation process, making it much harder for plaintiffs to bring lawsuits." Specifically, plaintiffs "would have to prove there was a 'strong inference' that the defendant acted with the required state of mind for fraud. Securities lawyers refer to this requirement as "'scienter' - a mental state embracing intent to deceive, manipulate or defraud." It's an extremely difficult standard to meet. When the standard was interpreted by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals it "even forgave executives who said they forgot to disclose bad financial news to investors." Cox's law provided additional protections for executives who made inaccurate "forward looking statements" about the future of the company to investors. So when, 12 weeks before the company declared bankruptcy, former Enron CEO Ken Lay told a reporter from Business Week, "We think the company is on solid footing, and we're looking forward to continued strong growth," he was unlikely to face legal consequences. Cox's efforts to limit the ability
of investors to sue for fraud was informed by his personal experience.
Cox worked for the law firm of Latham & Watkins from 1978
to 1986 before leaving to join the White House counsel's office.
[In 1994] the LA Times reported, Cox was sued for his work at
Latham that involved him in a business scheme that robbed nearly
8,000 investors of approximately $136 million. The scheme cheated
customers out of their retirement nest eggs by enticing them
to invest in phony mortgages. High-level officers at First Pension
Corporation, the company at issue, pled guilty to fraudulently
diverting funds. The charge against Cox was that he helped write
a deceptive plan to sell mutual fund shares. Cox claimed ignorance
and said he was only distantly involved in the case, but information
uncovered later revealed him to be more involved with the convicted
dealer than he previously let on. Cox was named in a class-action suit brought by the defrauded investors of First Pension. At the same time he was named in the suit, Cox was holding hearings on the Hill on the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, a bill that, according to the WSJ, would "sharply limit the circumstances in which investors could bring class-action lawsuits." The AP noted, "Cox was informed one week before the bill was introduced that attorneys were threatening to add him as a defendant in a securities lawsuit." Although the bill did not directly affect the case against him because the case was filed in state court, the AP noted, "it could affect future legal actions brought in federal court against him or his former law firm, Latham & Watkins, which is named as a defendant in the suit." Despite there being an obvious conflict of interest involved with Cox's legislation, the House took no action against him. Though Cox claimed he only performed
a small amount of legal work for one of the convicted securities
dealers, the AP uncovered documents that showed Cox had actually
worked with the felon in another major transaction. When confronted
with the new evidence of the relationship, Cox said, "I
don't have any independent recollection of that work." Back
on Capitol Hill, Cox added an additional protection for targets
of securities fraud lawsuits. "The day after the AP questioned
Cox about [the relationship between him and the convicted dealer,]
the congressman amended his legislation to prevent lawyers and
others from being sued if they 'genuinely forgot to disclose'
important information." NEGROPONTE NOT ALL THAT INTELLIGENT AMERICAN PROGRESS - Negroponte has precious little intelligence experience. And the experience he does have has been characterized by abject failure. As an ambassador to the U.N., he pushed inaccurate intelligence about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction as a justification for war. In December 2002, he called an Iraqi declaration that they didn't have any weapons of mass destruction "an insult to our intelligence." In January 2003 he said, "we are convinced that Iraq maintains and continues to pursue its WMD programs." At the same press conference, asked whether the administration knew Iraq was using aluminum tubes to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapons program, Negroponte replied, "the answer is definitively yes." NEGROPONTE
RAN ROGUE SPY OP IN IRAQ WORLD SOCIALIST - Ironically, while Negroponte is ostensibly tasked with unifying the disparate intelligence agencies, he has been accused of launching his own rogue intelligence operation in Iraq. The US think tank Stratfor, which has close links to US military and intelligence circles, reported that Negroponte ran his own "parallel intelligence service" in Iraq, because he did not trust the CIA's Baghdad station chief. There has been a proliferation of such informal intelligence services, Stratfor noted, most famously the Pentagon's "counter-terrorism evaluation group," created to substantiate the bogus claims of ties between the Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda. The spread of such off-the-books operations, Stratfor noted, "sets up the new national intelligence director - yet to be appointed - for failure As long as government agencies and on-the-side intel projects undermine each other, the NID will not be able to bring all intelligence efforts under one umbrella. The proliferation of small, separate intelligence groups also hurts collection efforts by impeding the government's ability to paint a clear picture of the realities on the ground-in Iraq and elsewhere." Negroponte's objective was just that - to counteract the assessment of the CIA, whose station chief filed an end-of-the year report giving a bleak assessment of the US occupation and warning that resistance could spiral out of control. Negroponte answered the assessment with a lengthy dissenting report of his own, painting a far rosier picture of what is widely seen as a debacle, not only in the CIA, but within the State Department and military as well. As national intelligence
director, Negroponte will doubtless continue along these lines,
pressing the CIA and other intelligence agencies to tailor their
assessments to meet the political needs of the administration.
In this regard, he will be aligned with the new director of the
CIA, Peter Goss, who issued a memo to the intelligence agency's
employees last November warning them not to "identify with,
support or champion opposition to the administration or its policies." MEET YOUR
NEW CZAR, WIKIPEDIA - Negroponte was born in London. His father was a Greek shipping magnate. He graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1956 and Yale University in 1960. He later served at eight different Foreign Service posts in Asia, Europe and Latin America; and he also held important positions at the State Department and the White House. . . From 1981 to 1985 Negroponte was US ambassador to Honduras. During his tenure, he oversaw the growth of military aid to Honduras from $4 million to $77 million a year. At the time, Honduras was ruled by an elected but heavily militarily-influenced government. . Negroponte supervised the construction of the El Aguacate air base where Nicaraguan Contras were trained by the US, and which critics say was used as a secret detention and torture center during the 1980s. In August 2001, excavations at the base discovered 185 corpses, including two Americans, who are thought to have been killed and buried at the site. Records also show that a special intelligence unit (commonly referred to as a "death squad") of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and Argentine military, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including US missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress. In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Óscar Romero's assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing. But in a 1996 interview with the Baltimore Sun, Negroponte's predecessor, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive. In early 1984, two American mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contras after the U.S. Congress had banned further military aid. Documents show that Negroponte brought the two with a contact in the Honduran armed forces The operation was exposed nine months later, at which point the Reagan administration denied any US involvement, despite Negroponte's participation in the scheme. Other documents uncovered a plan of Negroponte and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush to funnel Contra aid money through the Honduran government. During his tenure as US ambassador to Honduras, Binns, who was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, made numerous complaints about human rights abuses by the Honduran military and he claimed he fully briefed Negroponte on the situation before leaving the post. When the Reagan administration came to power, Binns was replaced by Negroponte, who has consistently denied having knowledge of any wrongdoing. Later, the Honduras Commission on Human Rights accused Negroponte himself of human rights violations. Speaking of Negroponte and other senior US officials, an ex-Honduran congressman, Efrain Diaz, told the Baltimore Sun, which in 1995 published an extensive investigation of US activities in Honduras: "Their attitude was one of tolerance and silence. They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed." The Sun's investigation found that the CIA and US embassy knew of numerous abuses but continued to support Battalion 3-16 and ensured that the embassy's annual human rights report did not contain the full story. The question of what John Negroponte knew about human rights abuses in Honduras will probably never be answered definitively, but there is a large body of circumstantial evidence supporting the view that Negroponte was aware that serious violations of human rights were carried out by the Honduran government with the support of the CIA. Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, on 14 September 2001, as reported in the Congressional Record, aired his suspicions on the occasion of Negroponte's nomination to the position of UN ambassador: "Based upon the Committee's review of State Department and CIA documents, it would seem that Ambassador Negroponte knew far more about government perpetuated human rights abuses than he chose to share with the committee in 1989 or in Embassy contributions at the time to annual State Department Human Rights reports." Among other evidence, Dodd cited a cable sent by Negroponte in 1985 that made it clear that Negroponte was aware of the threat of "future human rights abuses" by "secret operating cells" left over by General Alvarez after his deposition in 1984. WIKIPEDIA DODD COMMENTS MARYKNOLL GLOBAL CONCERNS - In addition to his work with the Nicaraguan Contra army, Negroponte helped conceal from Congress the murder, kidnapping and torture abuses of a CIA-equipped and -trained Honduran military unit, Battalion 3-16. No mention of these human rights violations ever appeared in State Department Human Rights reports for Honduras. The Baltimore Sun reports that Efrain Diaz Arrivillaga, then a delegate in the Honduran Congress and a voice of dissent, told the Sun that he complained to Negroponte on numerous occasions about the Honduran military's human rights abuses. Rick Chidester, a junior embassy official under Negroponte, reported to the Sun that he was forced to omit an exhaustive gathering of human rights violations from his 1982 State Department report. . . According to the Los Angeles Times, shortly after Negroponte's nomination was decided, the U.S. government revoked the visa of General Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, who was Honduras' deputy ambassador to the UN. General Discua was the commander of the Battalion during Negroponte's tenure as ambassador. He has publicly claimed to have information linking Negroponte with the battalion's activities. His testimony would be invaluable in illuminating Negroponte's collusion with Honduran opponents on Capitol Hill. In 1994, the Honduran Human Rights Commission charged Negroponte personally with several human rights abuses. On August 27, 1997, CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz released a 211-page classified report entitled "Selected Issues Relating to CIA Activities in Honduras in the 1980s." This report was partly declassified on October 22, 1998, in response to persistent demands by the Honduran human rights ombudsman. You can read parts of the document on the National Security Archives website. Only senators and their staff who have security clearance can read the report in its entirety. It is absolutely critical that every senator read and consider the entire report before approving Negroponte's nomination. http://www.maryknoll.org/GLOBAL/ALERTS/no_negroponte.htm GHALI HASSAN, COUNTERPUNCH, 2004 - At the time Mr. Negroponte was in Honduras, Honduras was a military dictatorship. Kidnapping, rape, torture and executions of dissidents was rampant. The military top and middle ranks were U.S-trained at the School of the Americas, the Harvard version of the CIA, based in Fort Benning, Georgia. According to Human Rights Watch, graduates of the SOA are responsible for the worst human rights abuses and torture of dissidents in Latin America. Some of its 60,000 graduates are notorious Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos of Panama. . . http://counterpunch.org/hassan06042004.html http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/apr2004/negr-a21_prn.shtml TERRY ALLEN, IN THESE TIMES - According to a 1995 four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, hundreds of Hondurans were kidnapped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. As Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson wrote in the series, Battalion 316 used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." Members of Battalion 316 were trained in surveillance and interrogation at a secret location in the United States and by the CIA at bases in Honduras . . . Negroponte tried to distance himself from the pattern of abuses, even after a flood of declassified documents exposed the extent of US involvement with Battalion 316. In a segment of the 1998 CNN mini-series Cold War, Negroponte said that "some of the retrospective effort to try and suggest that we were supportive of, or condoned the actions of, human rights violators is really revisionistic." http://www.inthesetimes.com/web2509/allen2509.html WORLD SOCIALIST -With the nomination of John Negroponte as the new US ambassador in Baghdad, the Bush administration has unmistakably signaled that it is planning to wage a protracted and dirty war of repression against the Iraqi people. . . Some of the media reports have stated that among Negroponte's qualifications is his experience in "running a large embassy." The most formative experience in this regard was his role as head of the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras at the height of the dirty wars waged by the Reagan administration against the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and the popular insurgency in El Salvador. As a stereotypical, Washington-dominated "banana republic," Honduras had been ruled throughout the 20th century by an alliance between the United Fruit Company, the country's military and the US embassy. However, in the 1980s, under Negroponte's stewardship, the situation shifted dramatically, with Honduras becoming a giant base of operations for the CIA-organized Contra war against the Sandinistas, which was to claim some 50,000 lives. From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was the US ambassador in Honduras, overseeing operations that included the illegal funding of the Contra mercenaries and a massive buildup of the Honduran armed forces, including the construction of bases, air fields and supply dumps throughout the country. Among these facilities was the El Aguacate air base, built on the pretext of providing a temporary facility for the thousands of US troops that were rotated through Honduras on "training" exercises. In reality, it was used to provide a permanent facility for the Contras and to funnel aid to these right-wing mercenaries in violation of restrictions imposed by the US Congress. In 1999, mass graves were discovered at the site, along with blood-stained jail cells. While he was ambassador to Honduras, Negroponte supervised a 20-fold increase in US military aid to the country, which he aggressively defended as a model of democracy in Central America. His predecessor as US ambassador warned him that the Honduran security forces were resorting to "extralegal tactics-disappearances and apparently physical eliminations to control a perceived subversive threat," according to a briefing book obtained by the Baltimore Sun for a detailed investigation it produced in 1995. . . During this same period, hundreds of people were kidnapped and "disappeared," including a number of union leaders, student organizers and other opponents of the military-dominated regime. Prisoners were routinely tortured on the direct orders of the chief of the Honduran armed forces. Much of this dirty work was carried out by a unit known as Battalion 316, whose members were trained in the United States and "advised" by the CIA in Honduras. While issuing his glowing endorsements of the Honduran regime's human rights record, Negroponte was intimately familiar with the grisly work of these killers. . . Honduras was not Negroponte's first introduction to US covert operations and mass killing. He began his climb up the national security establishment ladder as a political affairs officer at the US Embassy in Saigon from 1964 to 1968, a position that often serves as a cover for CIA operatives. From 1969 to 1971, he was an aide to Henry Kissinger in the Paris negotiations with the Hanoi government, reportedly criticizing Kissinger for making too many concessions to the Vietnamese. From 1971 to 1973, he oversaw operations in Vietnam for the National Security Council, then headed by Kissinger. Thus, for nine years he played a direct role in prosecuting a US war that killed millions of Vietnamese. ARKANSAS CONNECTIONS, PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - 1984: Ronald Reagan wants to send the National Guard to Honduras to help in the war against the Contras. Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis goes to the Supreme Court in a futile effort to stop it but Clinton is happy to oblige, even sending his own security chief, Buddy Young, [later FEMA official] along to keep an eye on things. Winding up its tour, the Arkansas Guard declares large quantities of its weapons "excess" and leaves them behind for the Contras. TERRY ALLEN, IN THESE TIMES: Like spooks from an abandoned B-Movie graveyard, officials of the Reagan-Bush era are emerging from the dirt and showing up inside the George W. Bush administration. The latest resurrection is John Negroponte, whom Bush recently nominated as ambassador to the United Nations. As US ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, Negroponte abetted and covered up human rights crimes. He was a zealous anti-Communist crusader in America's covert wars against the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the FMLN rebels in El Salvador. The high-level planning, money and arms for those wars flowed from Washington, but much of the on-the-ground logistics for the deployment of intelligence, arms and soldiers was run out of Honduras. US military aid to Honduras jumped from $3.9 million in 1980 to $77.4 million by 1984. So crammed was the tiny country with US bases and weapons that it was dubbed the USS Honduras, as if it were simply an off-shore staging ground. The captain of this ship, Negroponte was in charge of the US Embassy when, John Negroponte on CNN's Cold War. According to a 1995 four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, hundreds of Hondurans were kidnapped, tortured and killed by Battalion 316, a secret army intelligence unit trained and supported by the Central Intelligence Agency. As Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson wrote in the series, Battalion 316 used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." Members of Battalion 316 were trained in surveillance and interrogation at a secret location in the United States and by the CIA at bases in Honduras . . . Negroponte tried to distance himself from the pattern of abuses, even after a flood of declassified documents exposed the extent of US involvement with Battalion 316. In a segment of the 1998 CNN mini-series Cold War, Negroponte said that "some of the retrospective effort to try and suggest that we were supportive of, or condoned the actions of, human rights violators is really revisionistic." FINANCIAL TIMES: By making controversial proposals - [Paul] O'Neill backs the abolition of taxes on business - the Treasury secretary signals that the administration feels itself stronger than before, and is now ready to tackle larger problems. For starters, Mr. O'Neill says, it is time to review the purpose of taxation. Rather than seeing it as a simple mechanism to raise revenue, America must ask why it exists. It must also challenge progressive taxation, something no Republican administration has done before in a serious way. It must ask "how much money we the people as a collective group need to extract from each other to pay for public goods and services". National defense is a federal responsibility, says Mr. O'Neill, but all other outlays need review. Mr. O'Neill would include America's entitlement programmers for senior citizens in his survey. Currently, the government guarantees pensions and senior healthcare. Mr. O'Neill questions this guarantee, the roots of which lie in Roosevelt's New Deal. "Able-bodied adults should save enough on a regular basis so that they can provide for their own retirement and, for that matter, health and medical needs," he says . . . Mr. O'Neill "absolutely" backs the abolition of taxes on corporations. Instead, he says, the tax burden should be shifted to the individual. MORE JULIAN BORGER, GUARDIAN: The Bush administration's generous tax-cut plans were put into perspective when it was reported that the new treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, earned more than $56 million last year as chairman of Alcoa Inc., the giant aluminum corporation . . . The cabinet is a veritable tycoons' club with seven of its members owning assets worth more than $10 million. Eleven of the remaining 12 are millionaires . . . The president has assets valued at $11 million - $21 million, including a sizable Texas ranch. Much of that money was made while he was a manager and share owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team, which benefited greatly from state funding of its stadium. . .THE BUSH CABINET thus bests Clinton, 77% of whose initial cabinet were millionaires, a presidential record at the time. ||| JOHN SUTHERLAND GUARDIAN, LONDON - John M Poindexter had been appointed to head a new agency "to counter attacks on the US." . . . The agency which Poindexter will run is called the Information Awareness Office. You want to know what that is? Think, Big Brother is Watching You. IAO will supply federal officials with "instant" analysis on what is being written on email and said on phones all over the US. Domestic espionage. You want to test it out? Text-message any American friend, "Bmb OK. Allah gr8." . . . Poindexter is frighteningly smart and very unscrupulous. He graduated top of his class at the Naval Academy in 1958 and went on to a PhD in physics at the California Institute of Technology . . . He is the model for Tom Clancy's hero, Jack Ryan. After the assassination attempt on President Reagan in 1981, Poindexter was called in to review White House security. Reagan was impressed and appointed him a national security adviser, in 1983, with the rank of vice-admiral. At this point, things started to go wrong. He and Oliver North were found to be up to their necks in the Iran-Contra (guns for hostages) scam, which blew up in 1986. Poindexter was charged and found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and the destruction of evidence in 1990; this was overturned on appeal the following year. The case against them was that they meticulously wiped out 5,000 incriminating emails - but forgot about the back-up tapes. Even smart guys goof sometimes. Poindexter was also accused by a Costa Rican government commission of being involved in cocaine trafficking to raise funds for the contras, though this was never proved . . . Both North and Poindexter have gone on to do well. North has a radio chat program that rivals Rush Limbaugh in rightwing virulence. Poindexter was recruited by Syntek Technologies, a firm in bed with Darpa. His hand was back in the hi-tech cookie jar. As a company vice-president, Poindexter helped develop Genoa - an "intelligence mining, information harvesting" system designed to explore (clandestinely) large computer databases. Listen in on America's electronic conversations, that is. MORE JOHN MARKOFF, NY TIMES - John M. Poindexter, the retired Navy admiral who was President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser, has returned to the Pentagon to direct a new agency that is developing technologies to give federal officials instant access to vast new surveillance and information- analysis systems . . . Mr. Poindexter, who is 65, was a controversial figure both for his role in the Iran-contra scandals and for his efforts to assert military influence over commercial computer security technologies. With Oliver L. North, a former National Security Council aide, Mr. Poindexter was convicted in 1986 as part of the guns-for-hostages deal that provoked a Congressional investigation. The conviction was overturned in 1991 on grounds that the men had been granted immunity from prosecution as a result of their testimony before Congress . . . As national security adviser, Mr. Poindexter was involved with a Reagan administration initiative in 1984 known as National Security Decision Directive, N.S.D.D.-145, which gave intelligence agencies broad authority to examine computer databases for "sensitive but unclassified information." In a later memorandum, Mr. Poindexter expanded this authority to give the military responsibility for all computer and communications security for the federal government and private industry. MORE HALLIBURTON PLAYED FAST AND LOOSE WITH GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS CBS NEWS - Frustrated that they couldn't convince Republicans to conduct hearings on Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Democrats convened a panel of their own Friday to hear a former Halliburton employee testify that the company wastes taxpayers' money. Halliburton, which supplies military support services in Iraq and elsewhere, routinely purchased items at higher prices from preferred suppliers, said Henry Bunting, who worked for the company in Kuwait last year. "There were frequent instructions by procurement supervisors and management to keep ... requisitions under the $2,500 threshold to avoid competitive bidding," Bunting, of Houston, told the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. "Remember, this is a 'cost plus contract' so Halliburton would get reimbursed for its costs plus a percentage," he said. . . Bunting, who quit after working 15 weeks for Halliburton in Kuwait, handed Dorgan an embroidered towel with the logo of a Halliburton subsidiary, saying a company manager insisted on ordering the towels for between $4.50 and $5.50 instead of $1.60 for cheaper towels. . . According to [Congress members] Waxman and Dingell, Bunting and the unidentified whistleblower contend: * Top Halliburton officials frequently told employees that high prices charged by vendors were not a problem because the U.S. government would reimburse the costs and then pay the company an additional fee. * Higher than necessary prices were paid for ordinary vehicles, leased for $7,500 a month, and for furniture and cellular telephone service. SENATOR SAYS HALLIBURTON'S AUDITORS SAW PROBLEMS JACKIE SPINNER WASHINGTON POST - Internal auditors at the Halliburton Co. subsidiary importing fuel into Iraq warned the company that it was overcharging the government even before a Defense Department draft audit raised similar concerns, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) charged yesterday. Lieberman, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said members of his staff learned about the internal audit during a briefing Wednesday with the head of the Defense Contract Audit Agency, which announced last week that Halliburton may have overcharged the government $61 million by importing fuel from Kuwait instead of Turkey. In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Lieberman, the ranking member of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said auditors working for the subsidiary, KBR, "warned that the prices the company was charging to import fuel from Kuwait into Iraq were excessive and that the company's prices and contracting procedures were in violation of" federal procurement rules. "This extraordinary internal audit suggests that Halliburton had been previously warned by its own auditors that it was overcharging for the fuel but apparently ignored these important warnings and continued to charge the federal government inflated prices," he wrote. THERE'S ALWAYS A
WAY FOR HALIBURTON SHEILA MCNULTY FINANCIAL TIMES - Halliburton said in Tuesday several of its subsidiaries, including Kellogg Brown & Root, which holds the controversial US government contract in Iraq, had filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors to provide for a permanent resolution to the company's asbestos liabilities. The filings, in Pennsylvania bankruptcy court, followed Friday's announcement that a majority of the more than 386,000 asbestos claimants had voted to accept Halliburton's reorganization plan as part of a $4bn settlement. They agreed to limit to $2.8bn the cash required to settle the claims, so the subsidiaries were required today to pay $326m of that amount prior to the bankruptcy filing. The affected subsidiaries are to continue to be wholly owned by Halliburton, one of the world's biggest providers of products and services for the petroleum and energy industries, and continue normal operations. KBR's government services business is excluded from the filing. Analysts say Halliburton's asbestos liabilities, not the charges of US favoritism for Iraqi contracts and overcharging for services there, have been a drag on the company's share performance. Yet an expectation that it was due to be resolved by the year-end has already pushed up Halliburton's share price, so analysts were neutral on the news. U.S. PAYING HALLIBURTON $2.64 DON VAN NATTA JR, NY TIMES - The United States government is paying the Halliburton Company an average of $2.64 a gallon to import gasoline and other fuel to Iraq from Kuwait, more than twice what others are paying to truck in Kuwaiti fuel, government documents show. Halliburton, which has the exclusive United States contract to import fuel into Iraq, subcontracts the work to a Kuwaiti firm, government officials said. But Halliburton gets 26 cents a gallon for its overhead and fee, according to documents from the Army Corps of Engineers. The cost of the imported fuel
first came to public attention in October when two senior Democrats
in Congress criticized Halliburton, the huge Houston-based oil-field
services company, for "inflating gasoline prices at a great
cost to American taxpayers." At the time, it was estimated
that Halliburton was charging the United States government and
Iraq's oil-for-food program an average of about $1.60 a gallon
for fuel available for 71 cents wholesale. . . HALLIBURTON SERVES DIRTY FOOD TO GIs AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE - The Pentagon
repeatedly warned contractor Halliburton-KBR that the food it
served to US troops in Iraq was "dirty," as were as
the kitchens it was served in, NBC News reported on Friday. Halliburton-Kellogg
Brown and Root's promises to improve "have not been followed
through," according to a Pentagon report that warned "serious
repercussions may result" if the contractor did not clean
up. SEE ALSO FORBES - A government money market debacle unfolding in Florida is raising questions about former governor and presidential brother Jeb Bush's possible involvement in the mess. Florida froze withdrawals from a state investment fund earlier this week when local governments withdrew billions of dollars out of concern for the fund's financial stability. In the past few days, municipalities have withdrawn roughly $9 billion, nearly a third of the $28 billion fund (which is similar to a money market fund) controlled by the Florida's State Board of Administration. The run on the fund was triggered by worries that a percentage of the portfolio contained debt that had defaulted. A majority of this paper was sold to SBA by Lehman Brothers. Bush, as the state's top elected official, served on a three-member board that oversaw the SBA until he retired as governor in January. In August, Bush was hired as a consultant to the bank. Lehman spokesperson Kerrie Cohen, speaking on behalf of Bush, said they had no comment and would not say when the bank had sold Florida the paper. SBA did not return calls. While SBA wouldn't confirm, Bloomberg reported the amount of debt in default is around $900 million. Edward Siedle, a former Securities and Exchange Commission attorney who investigates money management wrongdoing and has worked on behalf of several Florida public pension funds, thinks this is just the tip of the iceberg. He expects problems with defaulting debt to crop up in public funds across the country, especially in states with disclosure laws weaker than Florida's. STEPHANIE FRANCIS WARD, ABA - Out of three interviews for a state court judge position, Florida lawyer Jayme Cassidy says she was twice asked how she would care for her children if appointed. Cassidy and other applicants say the Florida Judicial Nominating Commission for Broward County did not pose the question to fathers who also applied. However, the governor-appointed group is asking other applicants about their religious beliefs, say some Florida lawyers, and asking candidates how they would rule on certain matters, such as sodomy and displaying the Ten Commandments in the courtroom. . . In a regular hiring process, such questions might be considered fodder for a hiring discrimination suit. But screening for political appointments, even judgeships, does not follow the same rules. . . Maria M. Schneider, a Broward County assistant state's attorney who also interviewed with the Broward County commission, says a member asked her if she was a "God-fearing woman." JEB BUSH SPENDING $4 MILLION TO ADVISE PREGNANT WOMEN AGAINST ABORTIONS SEAN MUSSENDEN, ORLANDO SENTINEL - Women with unwanted pregnancies would be counseled against having abortions under a taxpayer-financed state program announced by Gov. Jeb Bush's administration Monday. The $4 million initiative, unveiled by Lt. Gov. Toni Jennings, would set up a state telephone hotline to direct pregnant women to nonprofit organizations, possibly including some with religious affiliations, that would encourage them to consider adoption and other alternatives to abortion. . . Jennings announced the proposal in Jacksonville flanked by the president of Florida Right to Life and leaders of several religious groups, including the Florida Catholic Conference and the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida. Funding for the program, which Bush included in his proposed budget for this year, must still be approved during the annual legislative session that begins next week. But family-planning groups and
lawmakers who support abortion rights said that although the
goal of reducing abortions was a positive one, Bush's plan could
be misleading to some pregnant women who would be given a one-sided
view of their options. RICE ON BOARD OF CHEVRON WHEN IT WAS INVOLVED IN BIG KICKBACK SCHEME WITH SADDAM CLAUDIO GATTI AND JAD MOUAWAD, NY TIMES - Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, is |
BUSH'S
MILITARY RECORD
WHAT BUSH AVOIDED
