Submitted by Laura Miller on
Almost as soon as George W. Bush took office in January 2001, he and his top advisors were plotting a regime change in Iraq, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told CBS' "60 Minutes." At Bush's first National Security Council meeting 10 days after the inauguration, O'Neill said going after Saddam Hussein was topic "A."
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
Ken Mehlman, former Bush political advisor and current Bush-Cheney campaign chair, is working "to boost the political impact of business" in 2004, according to The Hill. Among these efforts is the formation of an "association CEOs for Bush" group. "The campaign finance laws require the group to maintain at least a semblance of nonpartisan independence, but there is no question that it favors Bush's re-election," reports Alexander Bolton.
Submitted by Laura Miller on
"The White House has retreated from its doctrine of regime change and pre-emptive military action and is returning to traditional diplomacy in an effort to repackage George Bush as a president for peace," the Guardian reports. The British paper writes that recent signs indicate a shift from military action to diplomatic engagement as seen in recent interactions between the U.S. and North Korea, Libya and Iran.
Submitted by John Stauber on
The Guerrilla New Network has "picked the administration's packaging and sale of the case for war based on Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction as our Spin of the Year. The case has turned out to be so flimsy that the administration has been forced to backtrack and deflect questions about the still missing weapons. Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair this summer that it was a 'bureaucratic' decision to focus on the WMD, and even Rumsfeld has repeatedly contradicted specific claims he made to reporters in the run-up to the invasion."
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
"For the past three years, the Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government - cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters," report Christopher H. Schmitt and Edward T. Pound.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
"It's not quite Soviet-style airbrushing, but the Bush administration has been using cyberspace to make some of its own cosmetic touch-ups to history," writes Dana Milbank. "White House officials were steamed when Andrew S. Natsios, the administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said earlier this year that U.S.
Submitted by John Stauber on
"The man leading the US hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction [David Kay] will leave his post prematurely in the next few months amid dwindling expectations that there is anything to be found. ... 'This is a big blow to the administration and it will signal the effective end of the search for weapons of mass destruction,' said Joseph Cirincione, a weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment Institute for Peace in Washington. 'Some will continue looking but very, very few expect there to be any significant finds at this point.' ...
Submitted by John Stauber on
"Comcast Corporation, the largest cable TV company in the U.S., announced that Victoria (Torie) Clarke will join the company as Senior Advisor for Communications and Government Affairs. She served most recently as Assistant Secretary
of Defense for Public Affairs. Clarke previously served as Press Secretary
for former President Bush's 1992 re-election campaign, as a close advisor to
Submitted by John Stauber on
Norman Solomon writes that "few Americans have heard of Katharine Gun, a former British intelligence employee facing charges that she violated the Official Secrets Act. So far, the American press has ignored her. But the case raises profound questions about democracy and the public's right to know on both sides of the Atlantic. Ms. Gun's legal peril began in Britain on March 2, when the Observer newspaper exposed a highly secret memorandum by a top U.S. National Security Agency official. ...
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Stars and Stripes, the Pentagon-authorized newspaper of the U.S. military, is blowing the whistle on Bush's Thanksgiving photo op in Iraq. The soldiers who cheered Bush were pre-screened before his arrival, and others showing up for turkey were turned away.
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