The Oliver North File:
His Diaries, E-Mail, and Memos on the Kerry Report, Contras and Drugs
For more information, contact Peter Kornbluh, 202/994-7116
National Security Archive Update, February 26, 2004
Washington D.C., 26 February 2004 - The diaries, e-mail, and memos of Iran-contra figure Oliver North, posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive, directly contradict his criticisms yesterday during a TV talk show of Sen. John Kerry's 1988 Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee report on the ways that covert support for the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s undermined the U.S. war on drugs.
Mr. North claimed to talk show hosts Hannity and Colmes that the Kerry report was "wrong," that Sen. Kerry "makes this stuff up and then he can't justify it," and that "The fact is nobody in the government of the United States, going all the way back to the earliest days of this under Jimmy Carter, ever had anything to do with running drugs to support the Nicaraguan resistance. Nobody in the government of the United States. I will stand on that to my grave."
The Kerry subcommittee did not report that U.S. government officials ran drugs, but rather, that Mr. North, then on the National Security Council staff at the White House, and other senior officials created a privatized contra network that attracted drug traffickers looking for cover for their operations, then turned a blind eye to repeated reports of drug smuggling related to the contras, and actively worked with known drug smugglers such as Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega to assist the contras. The report cited former Drug Enforcement Administration head John Lawn testifying that Mr. North himself had prematurely leaked a DEA undercover operation, jeopardizing agents' lives, for political advantage in an upcoming Congressional vote on aid to the contras.
Among the documents posted today are:
* Mr. North's diary entries, from the reporter's notebooks he kept in those years, noting multiple reports of drug smuggling among the contras. A Washington Post investigation published on 22 October 1994 found no evidence he had relayed these reports to the DEA or other law enforcement authorities.
* Memos from North aide Robert Owen to Mr. North recounting drug-running "indiscretions" among the contras, warning that a known drug-smuggling airplane was delivering taxpayer-funded "humanitarian aid" overseen by Mr. North.
* Mr. North's White House e-mails recounting his efforts to spring from prison a Honduran general who could "spill the beans" on the secret contra war, even though the Justice Department termed the Honduran a "narcoterrorist" for his involvement in cocaine smuggling and an assassination plot.
* Mr. North's White House e-mails and diary entries on his personal meeting on 22 September 1986 with Noriega, following up Noriega's offer to "take care of" the Sandinista leadership if the White House would help "clean up his image."
* The text of the Kerry subcommittee report. Pages 145-146 directly quote 15 North notebook entries related to drug trafficking.
http://www.nsarchive.org
Posted: 26 February 2004 By: Jemima Kiss [Excerpts]
German broadcaster NDR will air a TV documentary this Thursday that investigates two video clips of US military action in Iraq that have been widely circulated on the web.
Both clips show US soldiers shooting apparently unarmed and injured Iraqis. According to military and legal experts interviewed by the Panorama programme, they show US troops breaking international law by shooting unarmed people. The programme will be broadcast on German channel ARD at 20.15, central European time, on 26 February.
The full transcript of the Panorama documentary will be available online from noon on 27 February and the two video files will be on the ARD site for Friday only, subject to final permission from CNN.
[Links to videos and other coverage at http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/story823.shtml]
A NOC at Bush's Door By William Rivers Pitt
Go to original t r u t h o u t | Perspective [Used by permission]
Her name was Valerie Plame, and she was a NOC.
NOC is a designation within the Central Intelligence Agency which means "non-official cover." It denotes an agent working under such deep cover that said agent cannot be officially associated with the American intelligence community in any way, shape or form. In order to keep covered, a NOC will work for the CIA out of a front company, which provides the illusion that the agent is just an ordinary accountant, lawyer or businessperson.
Between the CIA and the agent, a process is created to construct an identity which obscures completely the reality of the agent's true employment. The training of these NOC agents, along with the creation of the cover stories which are known as "legends" within the agency, requires millions of dollars and delicate work. It is, quite literally, a life and death issue. Little or no protection is given to an exposed NOC agent by the American government, an arrangement that is understood by all parties involved. A blown NOC can wind up dead very easily. Because of this, the cadre of NOC agents is small and elite.
Valerie Plame was a NOC working out of a front company named Brewster-Jennings & Associates. To any and all uninformed observers, she was an energy analyst who spent a good deal of time working overseas. In fact, she ran a covert international network dedicated to tracking any person, group or nation that would put weapons of mass destruction into the hands of terrorists.
That is, until the Bush administration got in the way.
The same administration, which invaded Iraq after bullyragging the American people with dire predictions of biological and chemical weapons flooding out of that nation and into the hands of al Qaeda, reached out and crushed the career of an undercover agent working to keep that exact nightmare scenario from unfolding.
The end of Valerie Plame's career came about a week after her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, took to the pages of the New York Times with an editorial that badly embarrassed George W. Bush. Bush, you will recall, stated in his 2003 State of the Union Address that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger to develop nuclear bombs. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger the previous February to determine if that charge, which had been floating around at the time, was valid. He returned after completing his investigation to inform the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA and the office of Vice President Cheney that the uranium claims were bogus. It was later revealed that the claims were based on crudely forged documents out of Italy.
This didn't stop Bush from using the fraudulent data to terrify the American people into supporting his Iraq invasion during his 2003 Address. Ambassador Wilson replied with a July 6, 2003 editorial which categorically humiliated the administration for allowing this claim to appear in the speech. "America's foreign policy depends on the sanctity of its information," wrote Wilson. "For this reason, questioning the selective use of intelligence to justify the war in Iraq is neither idle sniping nor 'revisionist history,' as Mr. Bush has suggested. The act of war is the last option of a democracy, taken when there is a grave threat to our national security. More than 200 American soldiers have lost their lives in Iraq already. We have a duty to ensure that their sacrifice came for the right reasons."
For the record, the number of dead American soldiers in Iraq is now 547. Many thousands more have been grievously wounded. There is no accurate accounting of the number of civilians killed in Iraq, but all estimates run into the tens of thousands. No anthrax, botulinum toxin, sarin gas, mustard gas, VX gas or uranium has been found there.
A week after the Wilson editorial was published, some six journalists along with columnist Robert Novak received telephone calls from two Bush administration officials. The sum and substance of the calls: To inform the journalists that Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.
It is an open question as to the ultimate purpose behind these calls. One school of thought says the calls were meant to smear Wilson by claiming he only got the Niger assignment because his wife was an agent, thus tagging him with nepotism and undermining his criticisms of the administration. The other school of thought, espoused by Wilson himself, says these administration officials deliberately annihilated the career of Wilson's wife as a warning to Wilson, and to any other insider who might come forward with data damaging to the administration officials. As the old saying goes, kill one and warn one hundred.
In the end, the result was the same. Valerie Plame's career with the CIA is over. Her network, the one that was working to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, is destroyed. The members of that network are now in mortal peril. The front company Plame worked through, Brewster-Jennings, was exposed as well, destroying the networks of any and all agents besides Plame working from that cover. The American intelligence community is disgusted and furious.
Larry Johnson, former CIA and State Department official who was a classmate of Plame's in the CIA's training program at the Farm, said when the CIA's internal damage assessment is finished, "at the end of the day, (the harm) will be huge and some people potentially may have lost their lives."
"This is not just another leak," said former CIA officer Jim Marcinkowski, who also did CIA training with Plame. "This is an unprecedented exposing of an agent's identity. There's only one entity in the world that can identify you. That's the U.S. government. When the U.S. government does it, that's it."
A February 5 report by UPI titled 'Cheney's Staff Focus of Probe' begins as follows: "Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said. According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis 'Scooter' Libby, were the two Cheney employees. 'We believe that Hannah was the major player in this,' one federal law-enforcement officer said."
Lewis Libby is one of the most important people on Cheney's staff. Along with John Hannah, who served as one of Cheney's Middle East Policy advisors, Libby was deeply involved in the activities of Rumsfeld's hand-picked Pentagon group, the Office of Special Plans. This group was put together specifically to re-engineer data regarding the threat posed by Iraq so as to manufacture justification for a decision to make war that had already been made. On several occasions, Libby visited CIA headquarters at the behest of Cheney to browbeat CIA analysts into "toughening up" their assessments of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. Given all the work Libby and Hannah put in to make sure Bush got his Iraq war, it is no wonder they were less than thrilled with what Ambassador Wilson had to say.
Did these men out a CIA agent and destroy a network that tracked weapons of mass destruction? We may soon know. Attorney General John Ashcroft has recused himself from the investigation. A bulldog of a U.S. Attorney named Patrick Fitzgerald is special prosecutor investigating the matter. Several members of the Bush administration have been dragged before a Grand Jury, including White House spokesman Scott McClellan, McClennan deputy Claire Buchan, former press aide Adam Levine, Republican consultant Mary Matalin, who served as a counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney, White House communications director Dan Bartlett, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Cheney aide Cathie Martin.
According to a Newsday report from February 22 titled 'Panel Questions White House Aides,' during the grand jury sessions, "Press aides were confronted with internal White House documents, mainly e-mails and telephone logs, between White House aides and reporters and questioned about conversations with reporters. The logs indicate that several White House officials talked to Novak shortly before the appearance of his July 14 column. According to the New York Times, the set of documents that prosecutors repeatedly referred to in their meetings with White House aides are extensive notes compiled by I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff and national security adviser."
Further reports indicate the journalists who were called may be questioned. Fitzgerald's first act as special prosecutor was to ask White House staffers to sign a waiver which allows those journalists to speak without violating confidentiality. This would determine, immediately, which administration official violated national security, destroyed a WMD network, and endangered the life of an agent. George W. Bush has promised to cooperate with Fitzgerald's investigation, but as of this date, those waivers have not been signed.
Her name was Valerie Plame, and she was a NOC. She was keeping weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists. What was the Bush administration doing?
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William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead writer for truthout. He is a New York Times and international bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'
Governor Dean's Statement on Ralph Nader's Decision
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Monday 23 February 2004
Contact: Jay Carson, 802-345-2348
BURLINGTON--Governor Howard Dean, M.D., issued the following statement today in response to Ralph Nader's announcement:
"When I announced last week that I am no longer actively pursuing the presidency, I urged my supporters not to be tempted by any independent or third party candidate. I said I would support the nominee of the Democratic Party, because the bottom line is that we must defeat George W. Bush in November, whatever it takes.
"This year, our campaign has made the case that, in order to defeat George W. Bush, the Democratic Party must stand up strong for its principles, not paper over its differences with the most radical Administration in our lifetime. In order to win, the Democratic Party must aggressively expose the ways in which George W. Bush's policies benefit the privileged and the most extreme ideologues.
"I will do everything I can to ensure that the 2004 Democratic nominee runs as a true progressive, as a champion of working Americans and their hopes for a better future. I urge my supporters, and all other Americans committed to progressive values and honest government, to stick with us, and stick with the Democratic Party, so our cause can prevail in 2004.
"Ralph Nader has made many great contributions to America over 40 years. But if George W. Bush is re-elected, the health, safety, consumer, environmental, and open government provisions Ralph Nader has fought for will be undermined. George Bush's right-wing appointees will still be serving as judges fifty years from now, and our Constitution will be shredded. It will be government by, of, and for, the corporations--exactly what Ralph Nader has struggled against."
AMERICAN JESUS
How the Son of God Became a National Icon
By Stephen Prothero
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
343 pages
Reviewed by Jules Siegel
In "American Jesus," Boston University professor Stephen Prothero diligently ponders the changing manifestations of Jesus in American culture over the years and finds -- surprise! -- you don't have to be a Christian to love Jesus. Believers of all faiths have adopted Jesus as one of their own icons. If only "Studies in Iconology" author Erwin Panofsky were alive to see this. You've got your black Jesus icon, your Moslem, Jewish and Mormon Jesus icons. How about that Hindu Jesus doing yoga? Far out!
Professor Prothero would never stoop to such outmoded hippie exclamations of joyous awe. His prevailing expression is a carefully almost concealed bemused smile. The Establishment lip will curl distinctly on trailer-trash-type trends. Anything decidedly Californian tends to produce a raised eyebrow. One would have to be a very well-informed religious scholar to challenge the accuracy of Prothero's library research. When he gets into areas that ordinary folk might know something about, however, he can be much less convincing.
He writes about the Jesus freak movement, "As heroin replaced pot as the drug of choice and overdoses multiplied, many came to associate drugs with captivity rather than freedom." (127) Few in the Bay Area will agree that heroin ever replaced pot as the drug of choice. Heroin has never been an important drug numerically. In the Federal 2002 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 75 percent of illicit drug users admitted using marijuana, compared with 0.1 percent for heroin.
A principal social characteristic of the time was the belief among users of marijuana and the hallucinogens that they were sacramental substances, one of whose main results was the feeling of closeness with the Great Spirit, whether the flavor was Aquarian, Mesoamerican, Oriental or Christian. Many an atheist found God through LSD and other drugs. For Christians, especially, getting to know Jesus was a common psychedelic experience. To this day, some Jesus freaks quote holy scripture to support their belief that God made drugs to help human beings, and that Jesus himself was a mushroom eater.
Prothero is a very gifted and astute observer with an attractively clear, direct and concrete literary style, but he is not easy to trust even when he gets his facts right. In writing about the way Jewish thinkers have attempted to come to terms with Jesus as a Jew, he must explicitly mention each and every one's condemnation of Paul's invention of some of the most irritating aspects of Christianity. Maybe this is just awkward writing, but it comes across as subtle ridicule. His humor is limited to a few Black Jesus jokes ("Yo Mama's so old she was a waitress at the Last Supper"), and two very lame Jewish Jesus jokes. He rarely writes about how people feel, but concentrates on institutional political motives and strategies. See how Jesus became a focus-group celebrity through astute marketing techniques such as seeker-sensitive branding?
It's really quite awkward for orthodox Christians to accept fully how others see Jesus and the uses they make of him in their own belief systems. The Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- are exclusionary. You can't be any combination of Jew, Christian and Moslem at the same time, although you can recognize Jesus. Oriental religions are inclusionary. As Prothero points out, to the followers of the Hindu religions, Jesus is merely another avatar of the universal life spirit.
As a child, Prothero's "most sacred Christmas moment" was his father's annual reading of "The Christ Child," a children's book illustrated with "wondrous color lithography, and always, that halo bursting forth from the page." (xi) Today, he seems rather annoyed by "crazes" such as "What Would Jesus Do?", "What Would Jesus Eat?" and "What Would Jesus Drive?" He notes that the 110-foot-tall, 750-pound Jesus hot air balloon "continues to lift off each Easter over northern California," and new controversies such as the dubious brother of Jesus burial box and Mel Gibson's "gruesome" movie continue to arise.
"What would Jesus make of all this?" Stephen Prothero asks at the end. "That is anyone's guess," he writes. "But I rather doubt that he is leaning back and laughing." (302)
Gee, why not? That Jesus balloon sounds a lot more appealing than some Christo wrap performance. In spreading the Gospel, your best guide is "in my Father's house there are many mansions." Better yet, go to the New Testament, Acts 2: "And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues.... Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because every man heard them speak in his own language." Jesus speaks the language of universal love. Each soul receives it and reflects it with a personal twist -- even Stephen Prothero in "American Jesus." Isn't that just great?
From CJC WEEKLY SUMMARY for February 23, 2004 (Journalists' Edition)
Produced by The Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families (CJC)
Original article
"Guidelines given if kids near meth lab"
02/19/2004, Omaha World-Herald, Leslie Reed
Nebraska officials say they've created the nation's most comprehensive guidelines for dealing with "meth-exposed" children -- youngsters found when police bust methamphetamine labs. In 2002, more than 2,000 children were found living in homes with the labs, where they could have been exposed to chemicals that can cause respiratory, immune system and heart problems, as well as brain damage, developmental difficulties and cancer. Nebraska's new guidelines specify what police, social workers, physicians and foster parents must do to assess and care for the children once they’re removed from the meth-lab home.
Contact: *Mike Heavican, U.S. attorney who played a lead role in developing the tool; *Gregg Wright, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Center for Children, Families and the Law.
Bush's Guard Service
His teeth were there; where was he?
Prove it and win $10,000 cash!
[Excerpts]
Help us flush out an authoritative witness to President Bush's tour of duty defending the skies over Alabama -- and put this tired, recycled AWOL story to rest once and for all.
Mr. Bush shouldn't have to contend with attacks on the National Guard, which is serving so bravely in Iraq. And we're willing to back up our support with cold, hard cash.
That's right, we're offering $10,000 cash! Yours to either spend or invest in job creation. All you have to do is definitively prove that George W. Bush fulfilled his duty to country.
If you personally witnessed George W. Bush reporting for drills at Dannelly Air National Guard Base between the months of May and November of 1972 we want to hear about it.
GOP More 'Negative'
By Brian Faler and Paul Farhi
[Excerpts]
The study, by University of Missouri professor William L. Benoit, found
that during much of the last half-century, Republican presidential
candidates have aimed a larger proportion of their attacks at their
opponents' character -- their honesty, integrity, leadership skills --
than their Democratic rivals.
Benoit found that in television campaign ads aired between 1952 and
2000, for example, GOP candidates focused 44 percent of their attacks on
such personal issues. Democrats did so about 33 percent of the time.
In 2000, the Bush campaign focused 43 percent of its attacks on Al Gore
-- in television ads, debates and speeches -- on issues of character,
while the former vice president devoted 16 percent of his attacks to
such issues.