The Bush administration is jeopardizing our security by excluding violent right-wing groups from terrorist threat lists. A classified Department of Homeland Security paper obtained by Congressional Quarterly that documents threats to national security:

[L]ists left-wing domestic groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as terrorist threats, but it does not mention anti-government groups, white supremacists and other radical right-wing movements, which have staged numerous terrorist attacks that have killed scores of Americans.

Here is what Mike German, a 16-year undercover agent for the FBI who spent most of his career infiltrating radical right-wing groups, had to say about the document:

[Radical right-wing groups] are still a threat, and they will continue to be a threat. If for some reason the government no longer considers them a threat, I think they will regret that.

We already knew that John Bolton doesn’t care much for the United Nations. But he is being sold to Congress by the Bush administration as a reformer.

Bolton, however, is on the record arguing that the United Nations is beyond reform for the foreseeable future. From an essay Bolton wrote in 1997:

This deep philosophical disjunction between the prevailing ethos of the United Nations and the fundamental American approach to governance is not something that will change in the foreseeable future.

What, then, does the foregoing analysis mean for the United Nations, and for America’s role within the organization? It means primarily that the rest of the world should have realistic expectations that the United Nations has a limited role to play in international affairs for the foreseeable future.

According to Bolton, the UN can’t become more relevant or effective through reform. And the “philosophical disjunction” is “not something that will change.”

The usual gang of conservative attack dogs are using today’s oil-for-food report (which, incidentally, clears Kofi Annan of any wrongdoing) to coordinate another round of feckless U.N.-bashing. Here are five facts you won’t be hearing from the talking heads:

1) The U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which took over responsibility for Iraqi oil revenues following the invasion, can no longer account for $8.8 billion of Iraqi oil money — twice the amount Saddam Hussein was thought to have gained from oil-for-food kickbacks.

2) Unlike the United Nations, which spearheaded an independent investigation of oil-for-food, the Bush administration has:

– Declined to take part in the whistle-blower case against Custer Battles, the firm accused of defrauding U.S. taxpayers of $50 million in Iraq reconstruction funds.
– Offered Halliburton early access to damning audits of its business practices in Iraq so it could scrub out the parts it didn’t like.
– Still failed to organize an overarching, independent investigation into detainee abuse scandals at U.S. prisons, nearly a year after the Abu Ghraib photos were released.

3) None of the money involved came from American taxpayers. Oil-for-food allowed the Iraqi government to sell Iraqi oil to pay for food, infrastructure, medicine and humanitarian goods. No U.S. money was involved.

4) The Bush administration dropped the ball on stopping the corruption (not once, but dozens of times). U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte “had the power to veto all sales of Iraqi oil and all Iraqi purchases of goods financed with oil-for-food revenues,” and failed to do so despite U.N. administrators identifying at least 70 cases for potential over-pricing of oil between 2001 and 2002.

5) A new Transparency International report released this month finds that Iraq is becoming “the biggest corruption scandal in history” under U.S. leadership.

Just minutes ago at a Pentagon press conference with General Pace, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was asked if the abuse of detainees was a systemic problem:

QUESTION: …I wonder if you would just respond to the suggestion that there is a systemic problem rather than the kinds of individual abuses we’ve heard of before?

RUMSFELD: I don’t believe there’s been a single one of the investigations that have been conducted, which has got to be six, seven, eight or nine…

PACE: Ten major reviews and 300 individual investigations of one kind or another.

RUMSFELD: And have you seen one that characterized it as systematic or systemic?

PACE: No, sir.

RUMSFELD: I haven’t either.

Oh really? Gen. John Abizaid — who overseas all U.S. forces in the region — had a different take when he testified under oath before the Senate Armed Services Committee last May:

From evidence already gathered, we believe that systemic problems existed at the prison that may have contributed to events there.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, 3/27/05:

[T]he real problem is that the conflict hasn’t ended…I think people shouldn’t have been surprised that a regime that had burrowed into Iraqi society over 35 years and killed and tortured and intimidated people so effectively didn’t quit just because they were driven out of Baghdad on April 9, 2003.

Vice President Cheney, 3/16/03:

I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators…I think it will go relatively quickly…(in) weeks rather than months.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, 2/7/03:

It is unknowable how long that conflict will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.

Despite President Bush’s sense of “validation,” the march towards freedom in Egypt is off to a rocky start:

The only man who has dared to challenge Hosni Mubarak for the presidency [Ayman Nour] was charged Tuesday with forging signatures to win approval for his party — an escalation in the government’s confrontation with the most prominent figure in Egypt’s fledgling reform movement.

Are the charges legit? You be the judge: “Fifty such papers were necessary. Nour received thousands, which have been in government hands for months.” And this isn’t the first time Mubarak’s government has harrassed Nour. In January, he “was called before Parliament and stripped of immunity [in Egypt, members of the parliament are generally immune from prosecution] on 30 minutes’ notice, with no chance to mount a defense.” Officials “dragged him down the street, then put him in a police van in the middle of Cairo’s busiest square, apparently as an example to the public.”

Surely, the White House must be outraged — or maybe not. Yesterday, the L.A. Times asked Secretary Rice specifically about the Nour situation. Describing her response as “uncritical” would be an understatement. Here’s a taste: “The president always said … that this process of democratization will happen, at a pace that is different in different societies. But in many ways, a sophisticated, great culture like Egypt, he has said, could lead in this regard, much as they’ve led in the search for peace by signing the peace treaty with Israel. So we’re watching, we’re encouraged and we’re encouraging the Egyptians to make these real reforms.”

Today, as we observe the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, it’s worth noting that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is actively dragging U.S.-Latin America policy back towards an emphasis on “internal security” — i.e., training and arming proxy domestic police and military forces (the same kinds of forces responsible for Romero’s death).

The shift from “hemispheric defense” to “internal security” actually began under the Kennedy administration. Charles Maechling, the U.S. State Department official in charge of counterinsurgency planning from 1961-66, now describes his own policies as a “one-dimensional Cold War approach [that] created more efficient instruments of repression than existed before,” allowing the U.S. military to “overthrow constitutional governments and install dictatorial regimes maintained by naked terror.”

With all the recent talk of democracy, it would be nice to think we’d learned from our mistakes. Nice, but untrue.

Here’s a little noted report from last November:

For almost two decades, the United States has urged Latin American militaries to move away from the Cold War “national-security” doctrines that resulted in so many abuses in the region. But last week Rumsfeld appeared to be preaching the virtues of reviving such an approach… [suggesting] that, given the challenges posed by 21st-century threats, it was time to re-think the separation of the armed forces from the police — a major reform pursued by U.S. and Latin American human-rights organisations as a way of asserting civilian control over the military and reducing abuses.

And now we know that Rumsfeld’s suggestions from November have become official policy. On Sunday, the Washington Post described a “new national defense strategy issued by the Pentagon” with a major new emphasis on internal security. “While U.S. forces have long helped to bolster foreign militaries through a variety of assistance programs, the new emphasis on aiding them against internal threats marks a significant departure from the traditional focus on guarding against potential cross-border aggression.“

Yesterday Vice President Dick Cheney declared, “I can’t think of anybody more qualified than Paul Wolfowitz to run the World Bank.”

The two most important qualities that one must possess to run the World Bank are that (1) s/he must care about the mission of the World Bank, and (2) s/he must have demonstrated superior leadership capabilities.

Working off that assumption, here’s a quick list to help the vice president…

Patty Stonesifer: President of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where she runs its mission to “improve access to advances in global health and learning”; formerly senior vice president at Microsoft; member of U.S. delegation to the U.N. General Assembly Special Session on AIDS.

William Reilly: EPA administrator under Bush 1, and former president of the World Wildlife Fund. Created an innovative plan that enabled several Latin American countries to have some of their debts forgiven if they invested the money internally on environmental reform.

Brian Atwood: First president of the National Democratic Institute; former administrator at the Agency for International Development, where he streamlined the agency to devote more money to services and less to bureaucracy; formerly directed Citizens International and is now dean of the Hubert Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota.

And there are so many others. If we stick to the “Americans only” tradition, two other good candidates would be Carly Fiorina and Jeff Sachs … the list goes on and on …

Before his 2003 trip to the continent of Africa, President Bush claimed that his administration had been “outspoken” on the issue of elections in Zimbabwe as “a democracy in Zimbabwe will improve the lives of all the citizens of that important country.” Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, recognizing the regional intricacies of the situation, wrote an op-ed that pushed for South Africa to “play a stronger and more sustained role in resolving matters in Zimbabwe.”

Two years later and with a new Secretary of State, the Bush administration claims to still regard Zimbabwe as an “outpost of tyranny” to which the “United States must help bring freedom.” Now a recent report by the Human Rights Watch documents “a climate of fear and intimidation” in the run up to “next week’s parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe.”

So will President Bush live up to the promises of his inaugural address and his rhetorical commitment to democracy? Will Secretary Rice publicly stand by the Zimbabwe people as she did with the Iraqis? If over two months ago Secretary Rice was ready to declare the time for diplomacy as now, will the Bush administration finally stop their four years of dallying and put pressure on the Southern African Development Community to really bring a semblance of democracy to Zimbabwe?

Or when Africa cries freedom, does the Bush administration just stay silent?

Two years after the invasion, American Progress takes a look at the situation in Iraq, by the numbers:

200: Lowest estimated number in billions of U.S. taxpayers dollars that have been spent on the war in Iraq

152,000 : Estimated number of troops currently deployed in Iraq

1,511: U.S. troops killed in Iraq since the invasion

11,285: Americans wounded since the invasion was launched two years ago

21,100-39,300: Estimated number of Iraqi civilians killed since the invasion by violence from war and crime

176: Non-U.S. coalition troops killed in Iraq since the invasion

339: Coalition troops killed by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)

70: Daily average number of insurgent attacks on coalition forces in February 2005

14: Daily average number of insurgent attacks on coalition forces in February 2004

18,000: Estimated number of insurgents in Iraq today

5,000: Estimated number of insurgents in Iraq in June 2003 Read more

The Defense Department had a couple of anthrax scares this week in two of its mail rooms. Luckily, they turned out to be false alarms. The actual danger exposed, however, was how the Department of Defense mishandled the situation.

The Pentagon kept crucial branches of the government completely in the dark. The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, were left out of the loop for hours. Local police weren’t told about the possible first incident until after the second incident was discovered.

Instead, the Pentagon decided to use an outside private contractor. The company they picked neglected to shut the mail system down, letting letters circulate before establishing things were safe. It also messed up the tests and came up with a false positive.

Fighting terrorism is no place for go-it-alone cowboys. The 9/11 Commission’s Report placed a large share of the blame for not stopping the attacks squarely on the lack of coordination between government agencies. On page 353 of the report, the commissioners stated: “Information was not shared … analysis was not pooled. Effective operations were not launched…. However the specific problems are labeled, we believe they are symptoms of the government’s broader inability to adapt how it manages problems.”

The key lesson: protecting America against terrorism takes coordination. The Department of Defense can’t go it alone.

Secretary Rice put on her kid gloves with Musharraf today:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Thursday praised Pakistan’s progress in instituting democratic reforms leading to elections in 2007 and its cooperation in the war on terrorism.

“This is not the Pakistan of Sept. 11. It is not even the Pakistan of 2002,” Rice said at a news conference.

The top U.S. diplomat gave no indication that she pressed President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who seized power in a 1999 coup, about giving up his control of the armed forces, a longstanding U.S. demand.

Asked about Musharraf’s status, Rice declined to answer, focusing instead on the country’s move toward reform.

Rice is correct, Pakistan has changed since 2002. Here’s an update on the “democratic reforms” Musharraf has instituted recently, from the State Department’s Human Rights Report:

In December 2003, the National and Provincial Assemblies passed the 17th Amendment to the Constitution. The Amendment transfers a number of powers from the Office of Prime Minister to the President, affirms Musharraf’s presidency through 2007, sets the terms under which the President could dissolve the National Assembly, and exempts Musharraf from a prohibition on holding two offices of state until the end of the year, allowing him to remain as Chief of Army Staff. In October, over opposition protests, Parliament passed another bill that exploits a loophole in the Constitution to extend the exemption until 2007. The judiciary was nominally independent but remained subject to corruption and political pressure.

World leaders and development experts recoiled in unison at the prospect of neocon hawk Paul Wolfowitz running the World Bank. ThinkProgress catalogues their responses:

Government Officials

Sources close to the World Bank board said Wolfowitz’s name was informally circulated several weeks ago among the 23-member board, which represents the bank’s 184 member countries, and the reaction was made clear to U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow. “Mr. Snow knows that the reaction from the board was unfavorable,” one source said. “Mr. Wolfowitz’s nomination today tells us the U.S. couldn’t care less what the rest of the world thinks.” [Reuters]

Recalling Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s dismissive term for countries opposed to the war, German Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul said the “storm of enthusiasm in old Europe is muted.” [Bloomberg]

In Germany, Michael Mƒ¼ller, the Social Democrats’ deputy parliamentary leader, described the choice as “horrifying.” “Wolfowitz is a hawk who has repeatedly proved that he is a firebrand,” he went on. [Deutche Welle]

Read more

Buried in today’s Washington Post article about a new poll showing 53 percent of Americans think the Iraq war was “not worth fighting”:

In the new poll, 56 percent said they think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the start of the war and 6 in 10 said they believe Iraq provided direct support to the al Qaeda terrorist network, which struck the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

Amazingly, even with solid majorities thinking Iraq had weapons and provided “direct support” to al Qaeda, the poll showed 51 percent of Americans still think the war was a “mistake.” Imagine what they’d think if they had accurate information.

One of the primary objectives of the World Bank is to combat global poverty. Outgoing World Bank president James Wolfensohn understood the link between global poverty and global security. Paul Wolfowitz, however, remains blind to the impact poverty has on dangers like terrorism and civil unrest.

“If we want stability on our planet, we must fight to end poverty. Since the time of the Bretton Woods Conference, through the Pearson Commission, the Brandt Commission, and the Brundtland Commission, through to statements of our leaders at the 2000 Millennium Assembly – and today – all confirm that the eradication of poverty is central to stability and peace.” — Outgoing World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn, 10/3/04

VERSUS

“These people are not fighting because they’re poor. They’re poor because they fight all the time. ” — President Bush’s nominee for World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, Congressional Testimony, 6/6/96

“We hear a lot of talk about the root causes of terrorism. Some people seem to suggest that poverty is the root cause of terrorism. It’s a little hard to look at a billionaire named Osama bin Laden and think that poverty drove him to it.” — Wolfowitz, 11/15/2002

In order to set spending priorities, the Department of Homeland Security has put together a list of possible terrorist attacks. However, DHS may want to brace itself for President Bush’s 2006 budget first. More than half of the potential scenarios involve some kind of biological attack, chemical attack, or disease outbreak. Yet, the administration’s proposed budget includes:

• Slashing health professions training by 64 percent, a cut that amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars, and the training of doctors for children’s hospitals by another 34 percent.

• Though medical experts realize that the National Institutes of Health needs a budget increase of “8 to 10 percent to capitalize on the progress being made in biomedical research,” for the third year in a row the Bush budget provides a “woefully inadequate” increase of less than 1 percent. At that rate, the NIH will not even be able “to continue existing grants.”

• Funding for the CDC’s state and local capacity bioterrorism grants is to be gutted by over $100 million. The grants help state and local agencies prepare for bioterror attacks by improving public health and medical infrastructure, so cuts directly undermine “the United States’ public health readiness if an attack were to occur.”

President Bush will today name Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the war in Iraq, as president of the World Bank.

Wolfowitz is a “highly controversial” choice for the position, the Financial Times notes, in no small part due to his flagrant misjudgments and extreme positions over the last several years. Wolfowitz has been criticized for pressuring intelligence agencies to produce false links between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, attacking Gen. Shinseki’s troop estimates as “wildly off the mark,” holding up funds for Iraq reconstruction, and reportedly approving the harsh interrogation methods that led to abuse and torture in U.S. prisons.

Current bank President James Wolfensohn, appointed twice by President Clinton, was known for “bully[ing] the bank’s staff and board into changing the bank’s focus toward a greater emphasis on alleviating poverty“; last month, the Washington Post described Wolfensohn as “eager to stay on well past June, when his term expires, but increasingly resigned to the prospect that the Bush team would prefer to replace him with someone else.”

Is there a single good reason to send arch-unilateralist John Bolton to the United Nations? Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice tried to present a few when she announced Bolton’s nomination last week. As we show below, not one holds up to scrutiny:

CONDI’S CLAIM: “John played a key diplomatic role in our sensitive negotiations with Libya when that nation made the wise choice to give up its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.”
FACT: According to Newsweek, talks with Libya “succeeded only after the British managed to sideline the Bush administration’s top arms-control official, John Bolton. … [A]fter a tense session in London, the British complained that Bolton was obstructing talks. Washington agreed to keep Bolton at home. The assurances that Libya sought were quietly given.”
FACT: Bolton opposed the very strategy eventually used to encourage Libya to disarm. “In a 2000 law review article he warned that the effort to isolate Libya via prosecution of the terrorists it sponsors and the UN sanctions ‘marks the final collapse of United States policy against Libyan terrorism.’”

CONDI’S CLAIM: “John was the chief negotiator of the Treaty of Moscow, which was signed by Presidents Putin and Bush to reduce nuclear warheads by two-thirds.”
FACT: The Moscow Treaty has been harshly condemned by nuclear proliferation experts (in part precisely because it does not reduce nuclear warheads, as Rice claims; it merely requires a change in their operational status). The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists referred to the treaty as the “jettisoning of predictability, verifiability, irreversibility, and mutual accountability as objectives in our nuclear relationship with Russia.” An essay for the prestigious American Acadamy of Arts & Sciences detailing the treaty’s “glaring inadequacies” charges that “If this agreement were seriously expected to carry any burden whatsoever, it would not pass even the most rudimentary scrutiny.” For more on the failings of the Moscow Treaty, read this primer by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Read more

Tensions are escalating between China and Taiwan over issues concerning Taiwanese autonomy. The stakes for the United States are huge because “any outbreak of hostilities could ensnare the United States, which is Taiwan’s biggest arms supplier and is bound by the Taiwan Relations Act to help Taiwan defend itself.”

Efforts by the United States to keep the peace could be severely hampered if John Bolton is confirmed as ambassador to the U.N.

In the mid-1990s, Bolton “was paid $30,000 over three years … by Taiwan’s government for research papers on U.N. membership issues involving Taiwan.” Bolton failed to register as a foreign agent, as required by law, claiming he was exempted because he was “providing legal services.” The papers argued that Taiwan should be recognized as a full member of the United Nations.

Bolton then proceeded to introduce a statement to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that “contained much of the same material that he had provided the Taiwanese” under his lucrative contract. Bolton did not mention his financial connection to the Taiwanese to the House committee.

In short, Bolton’s nomination could damage the ability of the United States to arbitrate the dispute, especially if it requires involving the U.N.

The Pentagon released a report written by it’s own Vice Admiral Albert Church yesterday regarding whether Pentagon interrogation rules led to rampant abuse at Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq. No surprise, the whitewash refused to assign any high-level responsibility within the Pentagon for the systematic torture at places like Abu Ghraib prison.

The 21-page report does claim future problems will be avoided due to a new system of interrogation rules put in place by Gen. George Casey, the commander of forces in Iraq. Church claims the new rules system “provides additional safeguards and prohibitions, rectifies ambiguities, and — significantly — requires commanders to conduct training on and verify implementation of the policy.” These new rules weren’t implemented until over a year after the abuses occurred at Abu Ghraib.

An even bigger problem? The rules are classified and no one knows what they are.

According to the New York Times, “Vice Admiral Albert Church III, now director of the Navy staff, admitted…that, well, he had not actually read them.” In the Q&A session of Church’s press briefing yesterday, when Church was asked about the content of the rules, he punted the question to an aide, Thomas Gandy, stuttering, “Tom, can you talk — I know generally, and I read it real quickly one time…But I think you need to ask General Casey. Or maybe Tom, you might know.”

Like Church and the rest of the American people, Tom, in fact, did not know.