There Had
To Be More Than 'One' "Born Every Day"?
Dahbud on P.T. Barnum
MASS GRAVES
UPDATED 201308.30
Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran
The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history -- and still gave him a hand.
BY SHANE HARRIS AND MATTHEW M. AID, | AUGUST 26, 2013, Article Source
Hussein holding rifleThe U.S. government may be considering military action in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago, America's military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen, Foreign Policy has learned.
In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq's war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein's military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.
The intelligence included imagery and maps about Iranian troop movements, as well as the locations of Iranian logistics facilities and details about Iranian air defenses. The Iraqis used mustard gas and sarin prior to four major offensives in early 1988 that relied on U.S. satellite imagery, maps, and other intelligence. These attacks helped to tilt the war in Iraq's favor and bring Iran to the negotiating table, and they ensured that the Reagan administration's long-standing policy of securing an Iraqi victory would succeed. But they were also the last in a series of chemical strikes stretching back several years that the Reagan administration knew about and didn't disclose.
U.S. officials have long denied acquiescing to Iraqi chemical attacks, insisting that Hussein's government never announced he was going to use the weapons. But retired Air Force Col. Rick Francona, who was a military attaché in Baghdad during the 1988 strikes, paints a different picture.
"The Iraqis never told us that they intended to use nerve gas. They didn't have to. We already knew," he told Foreign Policy.
According to recently declassified CIA documents and interviews with former intelligence officials like Francona, the U.S. had firm evidence of Iraqi chemical attacks beginning in 1983. At the time, Iran was publicly alleging that illegal chemical attacks were carried out on its forces, and was building a case to present to the United Nations. But it lacked the evidence implicating Iraq, much of which was contained in top secret reports and memoranda sent to the most senior intelligence officials in the U.S. government. The CIA declined to comment for this story.
In contrast to today's wrenching debate over whether the United States should intervene to stop alleged chemical weapons attacks by the Syrian government, the United States applied a cold calculus three decades ago to Hussein's widespread use of chemical weapons against his enemies and his own people. The Reagan administration decided that it was better to let the attacks continue if they might turn the tide of the war. And even if they were discovered, the CIA wagered that international outrage and condemnation would be muted.
In the documents, the CIA said that Iran might not discover persuasive evidence of the weapons' use -- even though the agency possessed it. Also, the agency noted that the Soviet Union had previously used chemical agents in Afghanistan and suffered few repercussions.
It has been previously reported that the United States provided tactical intelligence to Iraq at the same time that officials suspected Hussein would use chemical weapons. But the CIA documents, which sat almost entirely unnoticed in a trove of declassified material at the National Archives in College Park, Md., combined with exclusive interviews with former intelligence officials, reveal new details about the depth of the United States' knowledge of how and when Iraq employed the deadly agents. They show that senior U.S. officials were being regularly informed about the scale of the nerve gas attacks. They are tantamount to an official American admission of complicity in some of the most gruesome chemical weapons attacks ever launched.
Top CIA officials, including the Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey, a close friend of President Ronald Reagan, were told about the location of Iraqi chemical weapons assembly plants; that Iraq was desperately trying to make enough mustard agent to keep up with frontline demand from its forces; that Iraq was about to buy equipment from Italy to help speed up production of chemical-packed artillery rounds and bombs; and that Iraq could also use nerve agents on Iranian troops and possibly civilians.
Officials were also warned that Iran might launch retaliatory attacks against U.S. interests in the Middle East, including terrorist strikes, if it believed the United States was complicit in Iraq's chemical warfare campaign.
"As Iraqi attacks continue and intensify the chances increase that Iranian forces will acquire a shell containing mustard agent with Iraqi markings," the CIA reported in a top secret document in November 1983. "Tehran would take such evidence to the U.N. and charge U.S. complicity in violating international law."
At the time, the military attaché's office was following Iraqi preparations for the offensive using satellite reconnaissance imagery, Francona told Foreign Policy. According to a former CIA official, the images showed Iraqi movements of chemical materials to artillery batteries opposite Iranian positions prior to each offensive.
Francona, an experienced Middle East hand and Arabic linguist who served in the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency, said he first became aware of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran in 1984, while serving as air attaché in Amman, Jordan. The information he saw clearly showed that the Iraqis had used Tabun nerve agent (also known as "GA") against Iranian forces in southern Iraq.
The declassified CIA documents show that Casey and other top officials were repeatedly informed about Iraq's chemical attacks and its plans for launching more. "If the Iraqis produce or acquire large new supplies of mustard agent, they almost certainly would use it against Iranian troops and towns near the border," the CIA said in a top secret document.
But it was the express policy of Reagan to ensure an Iraqi victory in the war, whatever the cost.
The CIA noted in one document that the use of nerve agent "could have a significant impact on Iran's human wave tactics, forcing Iran to give up that strategy." Those tactics, which involved Iranian forces swarming against conventionally armed Iraqi positions, had proved decisive in some battles. In March 1984, the CIA reported that Iraq had "begun using nerve agents on the Al Basrah front and likely will be able to employ it in militarily significant quantities by late this fall."
The use of chemical weapons in war is banned under the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which states that parties "will exert every effort to induce other States to accede to the" agreement. Iraq never ratified the protocol; the United States did in 1975. The Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the production and use of such arms, wasn't passed until 1997, years after the incidents in question.
The initial wave of Iraqi attacks, in 1983, used mustard agent. While generally not fatal, mustard causes severe blistering of the skin and mucus membranes, which can lead to potentially fatal infections, and can cause blindness and upper respiratory disease, while increasing the risk of cancer. The United States wasn't yet providing battlefield intelligence to Iraq when mustard was used. But it also did nothing to assist Iran in its attempts to bring proof of illegal Iraqi chemical attacks to light. Nor did the administration inform the United Nations. The CIA determined that Iran had the capability to bomb the weapons assembly facilities, if only it could find them. The CIA believed it knew the locations.
Hard evidence of the Iraqi chemical attacks came to light in 1984. But that did little to deter Hussein from using the lethal agents, including in strikes against his own people. For as much as the CIA knew about Hussein's use of chemical weapons, officials resisted providing Iraq with intelligence throughout much of the war. The Defense Department had proposed an intelligence-sharing program with the Iraqis in 1986. But according to Francona, it was nixed because the CIA and the State Department viewed Saddam Hussein as "anathema" and his officials as "thugs."
The situation changed in 1987. CIA reconnaissance satellites picked up clear indications that the Iranians were concentrating large numbers of troops and equipment east of the city of Basrah, according to Francona, who was then serving with the Defense Intelligence Agency. What concerned DIA analysts the most was that the satellite imagery showed that the Iranians had discovered a gaping hole in the Iraqi lines southeast of Basrah. The seam had opened up at the junction between the Iraqi III Corps, deployed east of the city, and the Iraqi VII Corps, which was deployed to the southeast of the city in and around the hotly contested Fao Peninsula.
The satellites detected Iranian engineering and bridging units being secretly moved to deployment areas opposite the gap in the Iraqi lines, indicating that this was going to be where the main force of the annual Iranian spring offensive was going to fall, Francona said.
In late 1987, the DIA analysts in Francona's shop in Washington wrote a Top Secret Codeword report partially entitled "At The Gates of Basrah," warning that the Iranian 1988 spring offensive was going to be bigger than all previous spring offensives, and this offensive stood a very good chance of breaking through the Iraqi lines and capturing Basrah. The report warned that if Basrah fell, the Iraqi military would collapse and Iran would win the war.
President Reagan read the report and, according to Francona, wrote a note in the margin addressed to Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci: "An Iranian victory is unacceptable."
Subsequently, a decision was made at the top level of the U.S. government (almost certainly requiring the approval of the National Security Council and the CIA). The DIA was authorized to give the Iraqi intelligence services as much detailed information as was available about the deployments and movements of all Iranian combat units. That included satellite imagery and perhaps some sanitized electronic intelligence. There was a particular focus on the area east of the city of Basrah where the DIA was convinced the next big Iranian offensive would come. The agency also provided data on the locations of key Iranian logistics facilities, and the strength and capabilities of the Iranian air force and air defense system. Francona described much of the information as "targeting packages" suitable for use by the Iraqi air force to destroy these targets.
The sarin attacks then followed.
The nerve agent causes dizziness, respiratory distress, and muscle convulsions, and can lead to death. CIA analysts could not precisely determine the Iranian casualty figures because they lacked access to Iranian officials and documents. But the agency gauged the number of dead as somewhere between "hundreds" and "thousands" in each of the four cases where chemical weapons were used prior to a military offensive. According to the CIA, two-thirds of all chemical weapons ever used by Iraq during its war with Iran were fired or dropped in the last 18 months of the war.
By 1988, U.S. intelligence was flowing freely to Hussein's military. That March, Iraq launched a nerve gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja in northern Iraq.
A month later, the Iraqis used aerial bombs and artillery shells filled with sarin against Iranian troop concentrations on the Fao Peninsula southeast of Basrah, helping the Iraqi forces win a major victory and recapture the entire peninsula. The success of the Fao Peninsula offensive also prevented the Iranians from launching their much-anticipated offensive to capture Basrah. According to Francona, Washington was very pleased with the result because the Iranians never got a chance to launch their offensive.
The level of insight into Iraq's chemical weapons program stands in marked contrast to the flawed assessments, provided by the CIA and other intelligence agencies about Iraq's program prior to the United States' invasion in 2003. Back then, American intelligence had better access to the region and could send officials out to assess the damage.
Francona visited the Fao Peninsula shortly after it had been captured by the Iraqis. He found the battlefield littered with hundreds of used injectors once filled with atropine, the drug commonly used to treat sarin's lethal effects. Francona scooped up a few of the injectors and brought them back to Baghdad -- proof that the Iraqis had used sarin on the Fao Peninsula.
In the ensuing months, Francona reported, the Iraqis used sarin in massive quantities three more times in conjunction with massed artillery fire and smoke to disguise the use of nerve agents. Each offensive was hugely successful, in large part because of the increasingly sophisticated use of mass quantities of nerve agents. The last of these attacks, called the Blessed Ramadan Offensive, was launched by the Iraqis in April 1988 and involved the largest use of sarin nerve agent employed by the Iraqis to date. For a quarter-century, no chemical attack came close to the scale of Saddam's unconventional assaults. Until, perhaps, the strikes last week outside of Damascus.
Situation report on the Iran-Iraq war, noting that each side is preparing for chemical weapons attacks (July 29, 1982)
Iran-Iraq Situation Report by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
Top secret memo documenting chemical weapons use by Iraq, and discussing Iran's likely reactions (Nov. 4, 1983)
Iran's Likely Reaction to Iraqi Use of Chemical Weapons by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
Memo to the director of Central Intelligence predicting that Iraq will use nerve agents against Iran (Feb. 24, 1984)
Memo Predicts Use of Nerve Agents by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
CIA predicts "widespread use of mustard agents" and use of nerve agents by late summer (March 13, 1984)
CIA Predicts Widespread Use of Mustard Agents and Use of Nerve Agent by Late Summer by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
CIA confirms Iraq used nerve agent (March 23, 1984)
CIA Confirms Iraq Used Nerve Agent by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
CIA considers the consequences for chemical weapons proliferation now that Iraq has used mustard and nerve agent (Sept. 6, 1984)
Note on Chemical Weapons Proliferation and Posisble Consequences by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
Intelligence assessment of Iraq's chemical weapons program (January 1985)
Intelligence Assessment of Iraqi Chemical Weapons Program by Foreign Policy ~ View Documents Here
Between 1983 and 1992--the Reagan/Bush and Bush/Quayle era--the U.S. gave Iraq innumerable weapons, and issued about $2 billion in loans, most of which were used to buy even more weapons; the U.S. never expected full repayment. In addition, U.S. corporations provided Iraq with the means to manufacture chemical and biological weapons. The "point man" the Reagan administration sent to solidify U.S.-Iraqi relations--and who had personal knowledge that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran, and who helped remove the "terrorist" label against Iraq--was . . . Donald Rumsfeld. [http://www.liberalslant.com/wb042903.htm - missing link.]
ARTICLE COPY:
The Shock and Awe of American Ignorance
Playing Spin the Battle
by Walt Brasch, April 25, 2003More than half of all Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. According to an Associated Press poll conducted shortly after the conclusion of the successful invasion of Iraq, 53 percent of the nation pin the 9/11 murders on Saddam, something the CIA and most of the world intelligence gathering organizations have consistently discounted.
The fact that so many Americans believe this reveals the successful drum beating of the Bush administration along with a failure of both Congress and the media to adequately question the President's motives or to challenge the statements coming from the White House and Pentagon. President Bush and his horde of advisors have constantly said they never--ever--said that Saddam was the person behind the attacks. But, if the President could say "subliminal," that's what he, the vice-president, and their administration did to the Americans, with the complicity of the media who abrogated their responsibilities and made it seem that challenging anything the President said would be treason.
In message after message, the President referred to 9/11 and the war on terrorism. Then, as in the movies, he jump-cut to the evils of Saddam, letting the people think there was a smooth transition, while implanting those "hidden" meanings.
A month after 9/11, Americans believed Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible. Upon that basis, the President ordered an invasion of Afghanistan, one of several countries that harbored bin Laden and his terrorists, and overthrew the Taliban regime. At the time, finding anyone who thought Saddam was personally involved in 9/11 was as rare as finding a corporate executive who believed in unions.
Americans quickly learned that 15 of the 19 suicide/killers of 9/11 were Saudi. With a little more digging into buried news accounts, they might have also learned that 26 of al-Qaeda's top leadership at the time of 9/11, including bin Laden, were Egyptian, Saudi, or Yemini. Only one, a third level administrator, was an Iraqi. They might also have learned that eight of the top 10 financial contributors to al-Qaeda are Saudi. They might also have learned that Saddam and al-Qaeda had never been close, that as ruthless as Saddam was, he was relatively moderate in the world of terrorism except, of course, against his own people.
A year of Presidential drum beating and brow-bashing led to about a third of Americans becoming believers. A month before the invasion of Iraq, about 45 percent of Americans, according to the AP, believed the Iraqi dictator was personally involved.
The eight percent increase in the month after the invasion could be attributed not only to war-mongering rhetoric, but to the nation trying to justify why it sent more than 200,000 of its sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins to war.
By the time war had begun, the message wasn't that Iraq was behind 9/11, but that it was a potential enemy because it had weapons of mass destruction.
In the most recent State of the Union, President Bush had forcefully declared that Iraq had a weapons program that included at least 500 tons of chemical weapons, 38,000 liters of botulism, 25,000 liters of anthrax, as well as uncountable numbers of SCUDs. But, as in the telephone rumor game when a simple fact spread person to person eventually becomes a bloated urban myth, America's people and their news media escalated even those unproven numbers until the average working person may have been led to believe that Iraq actually posed a greater danger to America than did North Korea and Iran, both of which had nuclear capability to hit American targets, something Iraq did not have.
However, Iraq once had weapons of mass destruction, although none were nuclear. Between 1983 and 1992--the Reagan/Bush and Bush/Quayle era--the U.S. gave Iraq innumerable weapons, and issued about $2 billion in loans, most of which were used to buy even more weapons; the U.S. never expected full repayment. In addition, U.S. corporations provided Iraq with the means to manufacture chemical and biological weapons. The "point man" the Reagan administration sent to solidify U.S.-Iraqi relations-and who had personal knowledge that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran, and who helped remove the "terrorist" label against Iraq--was . . . Donald Rumsfeld.
But, slowly and reluctantly under a U.N. mandate, Iraq began to destroy its weapons. So far, 300,000 American and British combat forces, aided by numerous infiltrators and the best spy satellite system ever known to mankind, have been unable to locate any weapons of mass destruction--other than ones used by the Coalition forces. Maybe the Bush administration should send in Monk and Colombo.
The fact that the two-nation "coalition" of 300,000 overwhelmed and destroyed a country of 24 million quickly, and that Iraq's armies used only bullets, light artillery, and short-range, but legal, missiles in its defense, suggests that the defeated nation probably didn't have the weapons the U.S. claimed.
President Bush and his supporters kept saying the war wasn't about oil. But, the first thing the Coalition troops protected once they entered Baghdad weren't the hospitals or museums but the Oil Ministry. Maybe the Ministry was in an "historical district."
At the time President Bush was telling the U.N. and the American people that he had no plans to go to war with Iraq, his administration officials were meeting in secret with several industry giants with financial and political ties to the Administration to develop a plan for a post-war Iraq.
One of those giants was Bechtel, a multi-nation conglomerate with close financial ties to the White House. Another was a subsidiary of Haliburton, the multi-billion dollar oil company that once had Dick Cheney as its CEO.
In a few months, Americans may be shocked that Iraq didn't help al-Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks, that it didn't have weapons of mass destruction, and that there may have been collusion between the Administration and major corporations to reap financial rewards for rebuilding a country that the U.S. destroyed. We should be shocked--but we should also be in awe of how well the President and his administration spun their messages of war, and how dizzy the major media must have been to have accepted the words unchallenged.
Walt Brasch, a national award-winning reporter and editor, is professor of journalism at Bloomsburg University. He is the author of 13 books, including The Press and the State, and the current book, The Joy of Sax: America During the Bill Clinton Era. You may contact him through his web-site http://www.walterbrasch.com
Real Story of MASS GRAVES
[http://www.sfbg.com/News/32/21/Features/iraq.html -> missing link - see Made In America (below)]
In the early 1980s the Reagan administration chose to support Iraq over Iran in their bloody war. Neither country was exactly an ally, but the White House considered Iran the worse of the two nations, and cold war politics (along with a U.S. desire to maintain control of oil supplies in the Middle East) put us on the side of Iraq.
According to a 1990 report, "The Poison Gas Connection," issued by the L.A.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center (See sidebar), more than 207 companies from 21 western countries, including at least 18 from the United States, contributed to the buildup of Saddam Hussein's arsenal. Subsequent investigations turned up more than 100 more companies participating in the Iraqi weapons buildup.
The frontline cheerleader for America's corporate contributors to Saddam, the man who paved the way for Iraq to purchase millions of dollars worth of weapons and dangerous dual-use technology from U.S. corporations, was none other than the architect of Gulf War I, former president George Bush.
In a stunning July 27, 1992, speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, House Banking Committee chair Henry Gonzalez drove the Bush connection home in no uncertain terms:
"The Bush administration deliberately, not inadvertently, helped to arm Iraq by allowing U.S. technology to be shipped to Iraqi military and to Iraqi defense factories," Gonzalez said. "Throughout the course of the Bush administration, U.S. and foreign firms were granted export licenses to ship U.S. technology directly to Iraqi weapons facilities despite ample evidence showing that these factories were producing weapons."
Gonzalez, who was accused by administration officials of jeopardizing national security for going public with his gritty revelations, also stated: "The president misled Congress and the public about the role U.S. firms played in arming Iraq."
Documents gathered by Gonzalez and other independent investigators show that despite U.S. intelligence reports dating back to 1983 documenting Saddam's mass gassing of the Kurds and Iranians in the ongoing Iran-Iraq war, Bush pressed for support of the Iraqis. In a damning Oct. 21, 1989, cable from Secretary of State James Baker to then Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz, only a year after the mass gassing of the Kurds, Baker assured the Iraqis that the United States was very eager for a close working relationship with Saddam Hussein.
"As I said in our meeting," Baker wrote, "the U.S. seeks a broadened and deepened relationship with Iraq on the basis of mutual respect. That is the policy of our president."
ARTICLE COPY:
Made In America
It's no accident that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. U.S. corporations helped supply them.By Dennis Bernstein, February 25, 1998
IN JANUARY 1991 Iraqi president Saddam Hussein launched a barrage of long-range Scud missiles against Israel and Saudi Arabia. Dozens of people were wounded or killed -- including 28 U.S. soldiers who were asleep in their bunks when the Scuds hit. According to declassified secret nuclear, chemical, and biological logs kept by the Pentagon, Israeli police "confirmed nerve gas" at the site where the missile landed in downtown Tel Aviv.
While the incident was widely reported in the press, it was rarely mentioned that the technology used to increase the range of the missile that hit Israel, and to create the nerve gas that was apparently carried inside, was supplied to Iraq by U.S. and western corporations. Likewise, when U.S.-led allied forces bombed more than 30 chemical and biological weapons facilities during the 1991 war with Iraq, much of the deadly toxins that were released into the upper atmosphere, only to fall back down on the heads of U.S. forces, were created with the generous support of U.S. firms and America's leading politicians.
At one point, just a year before Iraq invaded Kuwait, Pentagon officials invited key Iraqi military technicians to a special conference in Portland, Ore., that amounted to a crash course in how to detonate a nuclear bomb.
Even today, the chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons U.S. troops could face in Gulf War II might as well be stamped "Made in the USA."
As the United States threatens to bomb Iraq for the third time this decade, the irony is brutal: Many of the same politicians, news media outlets, and interest groups that are promoting Gulf War II either supported or ignored the policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations that gave Iraq its deadly arsenal.
In fact, the problem goes far beyond the Middle East: If Saddam Hussein is capable of launching chemical, biological, or nuclear attacks, it will be the result of a long-standing U.S. policy of allowing defense contractors and other powerful corporations to sell the technology of death to almost anyone in the world who is willing to pay for it.
The Iraqi situation, former CIA military analyst Patrick Eddington told the Bay Guardian, "goes to the heart of the concept of nonproliferation and whether something like the international Chemical Weapons Convention is going to have any credibility."
"It has no chance of working if the countries who are the primary signatories, and for that matter the primary suppliers of dual-use technology," Eddington said, referring to technology that can be used for both civilian and military purposes, "are still cranking this stuff out and supplying it. It's a two-faced policy -- and that definitely includes the United States."
Our friend Saddam
Documents obtained by the Bay Guardian -- many of which have been available for years, released during Congressional investigations -- shed disturbing light on the U.S. policy of arming Saddam Hussein, a policy that may again result in the exposure of hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers -- and millions of civilians -- to dangerous chemical and biological weapons.
"If tomorrow the Iraqis fired a missile with biological warheads on it," Gary Milholland of the Wisconsin Project for Nuclear Arms Control told the Bay Guardian, "the missile itself would have been purchased from Russia, upgraded with help from Germany, and the bacteria would be based on a strain imported from the United States…
In the early 1980s the Reagan administration chose to support Iraq over Iran in their bloody war. Neither country was exactly an ally, but the White House considered Iran the worse of the two nations, and cold war politics (along with a U.S. desire to maintain control of oil supplies in the Middle East) put us on the side of Iraq.
In accordance with a long and continuing tradition and policy, that meant the U.S. would arm Iraq to the teeth -- without much concern for the long-term consequences.
According to a 1990 report, "The Poison Gas Connection," issued by the L.A.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center (See sidebar), more than 207 companies from 21 western countries, including at least 18 from the United States, contributed to the buildup of Saddam Hussein's arsenal. Subsequent investigations turned up more than 100 more companies participating in the Iraqi weapons buildup.
The frontline cheerleader for America's corporate contributors to Saddam, the man who paved the way for Iraq to purchase millions of dollars worth of weapons and dangerous dual-use technology from U.S. corporations, was none other than the architect of Gulf War I, former president George Bush.
In a stunning July 27, 1992, speech on the floor of the House of Representatives, House Banking Committee chair Henry Gonzalez drove the Bush connection home in no uncertain terms:
"The Bush administration deliberately, not inadvertently, helped to arm Iraq by allowing U.S. technology to be shipped to Iraqi military and to Iraqi defense factories," Gonzalez said. "Throughout the course of the Bush administration, U.S. and foreign firms were granted export licenses to ship U.S. technology directly to Iraqi weapons facilities despite ample evidence showing that these factories were producing weapons." (See sidebar)
Gonzalez, who was accused by administration officials of jeopardizing national security for going public with his gritty revelations, also stated: "The president misled Congress and the public about the role U.S. firms played in arming Iraq."
Documents gathered by Gonzalez and other independent investigators show that despite U.S. intelligence reports dating back to 1983 documenting Saddam's mass gassing of the Kurds and Iranians in the ongoing Iran-Iraq war, Bush pressed for support of the Iraqis. In a damning Oct. 21, 1989, cable from Secretary of State James Baker to then Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz, only a year after the mass gassing of the Kurds, Baker assured the Iraqis that the United States was very eager for a close working relationship with Saddam Hussein. "As I said in our meeting," Baker wrote, "the U.S. seeks a broadened and deepened relationship with Iraq on the basis of mutual respect. That is the policy of our president."
According to Gonzalez, senior Bush aides successfully lobbied against the concerns of other government officials to allow Iraq to purchase the technology -- technology that could be adapted for both civilian and military purposes. These high-level Bush officials, including Baker, forced this policy through despite substantial available evidence that the Iraqis were furiously working on developing nuclear weapons and other devices of mass destruction.
The CIA reported at a top-secret intelligence briefing in November 1989 that Iraq "is interested in acquiring a nuclear explosive capability" and to this end "is ordering substantial quantities of dual-use equipment." Nevertheless, Bush and other top U.S. officials continually pressured the Agriculture Department's Commodity Credit Corporation (CCC) and the U.S. Export-Import Bank to give Iraq credit for farm products and manufactured goods. From 1983 to 1990 the CCC provided Iraq with $5 billion in credits and loans to purchase U.S. exports. Between 1984 and 1990 the Eximbank insured $297 million of additional exports. As recently as seven months before the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Bush issued an order allowing the bank to provide even more credit to Iraq.
Nuclear know-how
State Department documents drafted after Bush became president in 1989 warned that Iraq would rise out of the ruins of its eight-year war with Iran as a "great military and political power, and [Iraq] is aiming higher." They also indicated that Iraq was planning to use "a big-stick approach" to the border conflict with Kuwait.
According to Gonzalez's July 27, 1992, floor speech, as late as the fall of 1989, only months before Iraq invaded Kuwait, George Bush signed a top secret National Security Decision directive, known as NSD 26, ordering closer ties with Saddam Hussein and Iraq: "Normal relations between the United States and Iraq would serve our long-term interests and support stability both in the Gulf and the Middle East," stated the top secret directive. "The United States remains committed to support the individual and collective self-defense of friendly countries in the area."
The Bush directive also encouraged U.S. firms to participate in the reconstruction of the Iraqi economy, "particularly in the energy area, where they do not conflict with our nonproliferation and other significant objectives."
And participate they did. According to House and Senate Banking Committee investigations, in the five years preceding the Gulf War, the U.S. Department of Commerce licensed more than $1.5 billion of strategically sensitive American exports to Iraq. Many were directly delivered to nuclear and chemical weapon plants as well as to Iraqi missile sites. More than 700 licenses were issued to U.S. corporations doing business in Iraq; many of these licenses were for the shipment of this dual-use technology to Iraq.
In April 1990, U.S. intelligence reported to the Bush administration that Hussein "has strengthened his ties to terrorist groups and may use terrorism to intimidate his Arab and western opponents." But Bush administration back-channel and international diplomatic and financial support continued unabated.
The cooperation between U.S. suppliers and Iraqi weapons planners continued up to the beginning of the war. U.S. technicians and officials moved back and forth easily between the two countries.
In one of the more stunning incidents, in September 1989, just one year before the Iraqi military stormed over the Kuwaiti border, U.S. military officials invited several Iraqi technicians to attend a "detonation conference" at the Red Lion Inn in Portland, Ore.
The conference -- the Ninth Symposium (International) on Detonation, was a crash course from the world's experts on how to detonate a nuclear weapon. Among the named sponsors of the conference were the Office of Naval Research, the Air Force Armament Laboratory, the Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, the Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Naval Sea Systems Command, Naval Surface Warfare Center, Office of Naval Technology and Sandia National Laboratories, according to the conference proceedings.
The three Iraqis attending, M. Ahadd, S. Ibrhim, and H. Mahd, were all representing Al Qaqaa State Establishment in Iraq. Al Qaqaa, according to an Oct. 27, 1992, report by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, "was Iraq's major explosives and rocket fuel factory." It was also a "filling station for ballistic missiles" and home for Iraq's nuclear weapons program.
Joining the Iraqis in this quaint setting on the Columbia River, learning all about nuclear bomb detonation, were 445 participants from 20 countries, including Israelis and technicians from South Korea.
The list of U.S. corporations that teamed up with Saddam reads like a who's who of America's favorite defense contractors. According to the Wiesenthal report and the Senate Banking Committee they include Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, and Sperry/Unisys among others.
Bush's secret weapons
In a letter dated July 9, 1992, twenty Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee petitioned the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate "serious allegations of possible violations of federal criminal statutes by high-ranking officials of the Executive Branch."
Among the potential criminal violations cited in the petition were making false statements, obstruction of justice, concealment or falsification of records, perjury, mail and wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud the United States or to commit an offense against the United States, and financial conflict of interest by high executive branch officials.
The 1992 letter further cited the Bush administration's "willful and repeated failure" to comply with requests by the House Judiciary and other committees for both documents and witnesses.
According to the 27-month Gonzalez Investigation, the Bush administration set up an "interagency" group after the Gulf War to prevent Congress from finding out about U.S. aid to Iraq before the Kuwait invasion.
Gonzalez's concerns centered on the handling by the Justice Department of the investigation into Banka Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) in Atlanta. Most of Iraq's purchases of sensitive technology were handled by BNL. According to Gonzalez, Iraq had set up a secret network to buy equipment for missiles and for nuclear, chemical, and germ weapons. More than $5 billion in soft loans were funneled through the bank to the Iraqis in the five years leading up to the war. According to Gonzalez's compelling investigation, almost half of the $5 billion was funneled directly into Iraq's ambitious weapons program.
The Bush administration's task was to limit the investigation to one low-level bank official in Atlanta, resisting any attempt to connect the Iraqi loans to high administration officials or to BNL's mother bank in Italy and other shady institutions, such as the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the CIA's bank of choice.
To this end, at least five federal agencies apparently misled, lied to, and blatantly stonewalled prosecutors in charge of the BNL investigation. According to a strongly worded October 1992 statement by the then chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, David Boren, in support of the appointment of a special prosecutor, the CIA "with strong advice" from the Justice Department "authored a misleading letter to the acting U.S. attorney in Atlanta" regarding the BNL investigation. "In light of this new information," Boren stated, "I call on the attorney general to meet his obligations ... and appoint a special prosecutor."
To make his case, Boren cited the concerns of the federal judge in the stymied BNL case. In a sharp rebuke of the government's behavior, Judge Marvin Shoob accused Bush officials of stonewalling and deception in the BNL case and joined the call for a special prosecutor.
"High-level officials in the Justice Department and the State Department met with the Italian ambassador," stated the frustrated federal judge, and "...decisions were made at the top levels of the United States government and within the intelligence community to shape this case." Shoob also noted that "the local prosecutor in this matter received ... highly unusual and inappropriate telephone calls from the White House Office of Legal Counsel."
Despite the strong words from Boren, Gonzalez, and Shoob, a special prosecutor was never appointed, and no administration officials were ever indicted or even forced to testify. Low-level bank officials ultimately took the rap for a multibillion-dollar, illegal, secret government scheme, spearheaded by the president of the United States, to arm Iraq.
And the coverup, thanks to Clinton officials, continues to this day. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Gore called the coverup of the secret Bush policy to arm Iraq "bigger than Watergate ever was," but in a Jan. 16, 1995, report, the Clinton Justice Department absolved the Bush administration and stated that it had found no evidence "that U.S. agencies or officials illegally armed Iraq."
War criminals
London Independent reporter Robert Fisk has written movingly about riding back to Tehran in a train with young Iranian soldiers returning from the front during the bloody war with Iraq -- a war fueled by western politicians and western arms dealers. "All of them were coughing up Saddam Hussein's poisons from their lungs into blood-red swabs and bandages," writes the veteran Middle East reporter. "And the mustard gas that was slowly killing them permeated the whole great 20-carriage train as it thundered up from the desert battlefields of the first Gulf War." Fisk points out it was not only technology that the United States and the Europeans provided Saddam with to create nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, but the means to efficiently deploy them.
"The Americans had sold him helicopters to spray the crops with pesticide," Fisk said, "the 'crops,' of course, being human beings." And in an astounding revelation Fisk stated, "I later met the [German] arms dealer who flew from the Pentagon to Baghdad with U.S. satellite photos of the Iranian front lines to help Saddam kill more Iranians."
Iranians weren't the only victims. Tens of thousands of U.S. soldiers and military personnel were doused with chemical and biological warfare agents in the first Gulf War. In fact, Gulf veterans have filed a billion-dollar class action lawsuit in federal court in Galveston, Texas, against companies that supplied Iraq with the dual-use technology to create its weapons of mass destruction. Among the companies named are Bechtel, M.W. Kellog, Dresser Industries, and Interchem Inc…
The Iran-Contra Affair: The Making of a Scandal,
1983-1988
The
Iran-Contra Scandal in Perspective [missing link - new link below]
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/publications/irancontra/irancon.html
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB210/index.htm
and how the Republican
Party & their Corporate Buddies
hid
the information: [missing link - new link below]
http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/nsa/publications/DOC_readers/icread/icread.html
Which raises the question
why the Pentagon,
in this Village
Voice article wanted to do this:
According to a Denver Post report on January 24, the Pentagon has been considering an option to bulldoze the bodies of U.S. soldiers killed by chemical or biological weapons into mass graves and then burn them to save the lives of surviving troops.
In conclusion,
When contemplating war, beware of babies in incubators
The babies in the incubator story is a classic example of how easy it is for the public and legislators to be mislead during moments of high tension. It's also a vivid example of how the media can be manipulated if we do not keep our guards up.
The Bush Administration Has Been Less Than Honest With the American People.
Take Ashcroft for Example:
THE LIE
Library responds to Ashcroft [missing link - copy of article below]
In a speech last week, Ashcroft mocked and condemned the country's largest library association for believing the FBI wants to know "how far you have gotten on the latest Tom Clancy novel."
ARTICLE COPY:
Ashcroft Mocks Librarians and Others Who Oppose Parts of Counterterrorism Law
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: September 16, 2003Attorney General John Ashcroft today accused the country's biggest library association and other critics of fueling ''baseless hysteria'' about the government's ability to pry into the public's reading habits.
In an unusually pointed attack as part of his latest speech in defense of the Bush administration's counterterrorism initiatives, Mr. Ashcroft mocked and condemned the American Library Association and other Justice Department critics for believing that the F.B.I. wants to know ''how far you have gotten on the latest Tom Clancy novel.''
The association, which has argued for months that the government's new antiterrorism powers risk encroaching on the privacy of library users, took some satisfaction from the broadside.
'If he's coming after us so specifically, we must be having an impact,'' said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the library association's Washington office.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the department, said the speech was intended not as an attack on librarians, but on groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and politicians who he said had persuaded librarians to mistrust the government.
The American Librarian Association ''has been somewhat duped by those who are ideologically opposed to the Patriot Act,'' Mr. Corallo said.
Mr. Ashcroft's remarks, he said, ''should be seen as a jab at those who would mislead librarians and the general public into believing the absurd, that the F.B.I. is running around monitoring libraries instead of going after terrorists.''
Mr. Ashcroft's speech was his 17th in the last month in defense of the sweeping counterterrorism act passed after the Sept. 11 attacks and under increasing criticism for those who contend that it gives the government too much power.
But in departing from his usual remarks, Mr. Ashcroft dwelled today much more expansively on the government's powers under the legislation to demand access to library records in searching for terrorists.
That issue has helped galvanize opposition to the act from libraries nationwide and from some 160 communities that have protested the law as too far-reaching.
It is not known how many times federal agents have actually used the law to gain access to library records because that information is classified. Even the association said it did not know because libraries served with demands for such records are bound by a gag order.
Mr. Ashcroft said critics had tried to persuade the public that the F.B.I. was monitoring libraries to ''ask every person exiting the library, 'Why were you at the library? What were you reading? Did you see anything suspicious?' ''
The Justice Department, Mr. Ashcroft said, ''has no interest in your reading habits.''
''Tracking reading habits would betray our high regard for the First Amendment,'' he said. ''And even if someone in government wanted to do so, it would represent an impossible workload and a waste of law enforcement resources.''
Attorney General John Ashcroft said the American Library Association was fueling a "baseless hysteria" among citizens about the Bush administration's desire to snoop on reading habits of citizens under the USA Patriot Act.
THE TRUTH
FBI checks out library records of terrorist suspects
University of Illinois conducted a survey of 1,020 public libraries in January and February and found that 85 libraries had been asked by federal or local law enforcement officers for information about patrons related to Sept. 11.
Thanks to Rhino's BLOG for the 2nd link.
The Patriot
Act Is Not About Terrorism,
It Is About Control of United States Citizens.
No mercy in Ashcroft's brand of justice
http://www.khilafah.com/home/category.php?DocumentID=8129&TagID=2 [missing link - copy of article below]
Attorney General John Ashcroft doesn't have enough to do, hunting down terrorists. With the help of a rollover Congress, he now has a new and bigger club to go after federal judges who impose lighter sentences in criminal cases than he would like.
As a faithful lord high executioner of the administration's much touted "compassionate conservatism," Ashcroft wants to clamp down on those judges.
ARTICLE COPY August 27, 2003:
Ashcroft's Power Grows In Terrorist Witch Hunt
by Helen Thomas, August 16, 2003
WASHINGTON -- Attorney General John Ashcroft doesn't have enough to do, hunting down terrorists.
With the help of a rollover Congress, he now has a new and bigger club to go after federal judges who impose lighter sentences in criminal cases than he would like.
As a faithful lord high executioner of the administration's much touted "compassionate conservatism," Ashcroft wants to clamp down on those judges.
At issue are the sentencing guidelines laid down by a federal commission that Congress created in 1984. Under pressure from Ashcroft, Congress voted in April to restrict the flexibility of federal judges to depart from the guidelines.
The new law also makes it easier for prosecutors to appeal more cases when they don't like the court-imposed prison sentences.
As it stands now, the attorney general must report within 15 days to Congress the identity of any federal judge who deviates from the rules and the reasons why. And the department must report within five days whether it intends to appeal.
The empowered attorney general then issued an order on July 28 to federal prosecutors, directing them to report all "downward departure" sentencing decisions in criminal cases.
Previously, the prosecutors were required to report to the Justice Department only those sentences that they had objected to and wanted to appeal.
The overall effect is to give Ashcroft more control and the final say on whether to appeal a sentence. And it reduces the powers of the prosecutors in the field, the people who know more about the defendant and the circumstances of the case than does anyone in Washington.
It looks to me as if Ashcroft has designed a new program to intimidate federal judges.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., accused Ashcroft of an "ongoing attack on judicial independence" and said he was requiring federal prosecutors to establish a "black list" of judges who diverge from the guidelines.
Department lawyers say the new rules are in the interest of uniformity. But Ashcroft obviously was miffed that some judges weren't handing out the tough sentences that he wanted.
The sentencing commission has statistics showing that 35 percent of the sentences handed down in federal court in the 2001 fiscal year fell below the guidelines.
Many of those sentences were the results of plea-bargaining and had the approval of the prosecutors.
Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, said many judges have denounced the guidelines for producing "unduly long sentences" and hampering the courts' ability to fashion punishments to fit the crimes.
Ashcroft wants judges to treat defendants as "statistics rather than individuals," Turley added. In all fairness, Congress shares the blame for giving him even more power to do so.
In his new order to the prosecutors, Ashcroft cited a May 5 speech by Chief Justice William Rehnquist who acknowledged that it was up to Congress to establish guidelines on sentencing policies.
But Ashcroft conveniently failed to mention that Rehnquist also used the same speech to criticize the sentencing restrictions as "an unwarranted and ill-considered effort to intimidate individual judges in the performance of their official duties."
Rehnquist also complained to Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, that limiting judicial discretion "would seriously impair the ability of courts to impose just and reasonable sentences."
In a speech last Saturday to the ABA convention in San Francisco, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a moderate conservative, criticized mandatory minimum sentencing and said prison terms were too long. He told the lawyers "our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long."
He branded the guidelines as "not wise, not just."
An even more dramatic protest against the guidelines came from U.S. District Judge John S. Martin. He quit the bench in Manhattan in June and charged that Congress was attempting "to intimidate judges."
U.S. District Judge Irene M. Keeley of Clarksburg, W.Va., who heads the ABA's National Conference of Federal Judges, supports the critics of the guidelines.
She said the jurists would continue to "evaluate each sentence on a case-by-case basis." A study of the facts will show there is no evidence that judges have been bending the sentencing rules, she said.
Obviously Ashcroft's sense of justice is not the kind that is touched by the quality of mercy.
Target:'Narco-Terror'
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/WorldNewsTonight/victory_act030820.html [missing link - new link below]
http://cannabisnews.com/news/17/thread17116.shtml
ABCNEWS.com has obtained a draft of the Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act of 2003, or VICTORY Act, which could be introduced to Congress this fall, and which appears to have been prepared by the office of Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Provisions in the draft would:
Raise the threshold for rejecting illegal wiretaps. The draft reads: "A court may not grant a motion to suppress the contents of a wire or oral communication, or evidence derived therefrom, unless the court finds that the violation of this chapter involved bad faith by law enforcement."
Extend subpoena powers by giving giving law enforcement the authority to issue non-judicial subpoenas which require a person suspected of involvement in money laundering to turn over financial records and appear in a prosecutor's office to answer questions.
Extend the power of the attorney general to issue so-called administrative "sneak-and-peak" subpoenas to drug cases. These subpoenas allow law enforcement to gather evidence from wire communication, financial records or other sources before the subject of the search is notified.
Allow law enforcement to seek a court order to require the "provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service" or a financial institution to delay notifying a customer that their records had been subpoenaed.
"This bill would treat drug possession as a 'terrorist offense' and drug dealers as 'narco-terrorist kingpins,' " the aide argued. "To say that terrorist groups use a small percentage of the drug trafficking in the United States to finance terrorism may be a fair point, but this bill would allow the government to prosecute most drug cases as terrorism cases."
Concluded the aide: "It really seems to be more about a political agenda to jail drug users than a serious attempt to stop terrorists."
John
Ashcroft's
Patriot Act Summer
Tour
by Mark
Fiore (Flash format)
Ashcroft's Little Secret - http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8723 [missing link, see below]
Quite simply, Ashcroft's campaign and leadership PAC broke the law by giving and receiving a contribution that exceeded the federal contribution limit by at least 10 times and possibly by more than 200 times, and by failing to disclose the contribution in the first place.
ARTICLE COPY August 27, 2003:
Ashcroft's Little Secret
As the top law enforcement officer of the federal government, the Attorney General of the United States has a moral duty to act with honesty and integrity, and to guard his reputation as a law-abiding citizen. This means the Attorney General must -- at the very minimum -- make sure the political committees connected to him follow the nation's campaign finance rules. Respect for the law demands no less.
So why is John Ashcroft stonewalling about charges that his 2000 Senate campaign broke the federal campaign finance law?
A coalition of voters and campaign finance reform groups filed a complaint in March 2001 with the Federal Election Commission, alleging that Mr. Ashcroft's leadership PAC, "Spirit of America," illegally contributed a fundraising list of 100,000 donors to his 2000 Senate campaign in Missouri. Neither the PAC nor the campaign committee reported the contribution.
Spirit of America developed the list of donors between 1997 and 1999 at a cost of more than $2 million, according to a press report. Upon receiving the list at no charge, the Ashcroft campaign allegedly rented the list out and made over $100,000.
If this is true, Ashcroft's PAC is in hot water on a number of counts. PACs are prohibited from contributing more than $10,000 to federal candidates in an election cycle, and campaigns are likewise prohibited from receiving such contributions. That limit includes the non-monetary donations, like the fundraising list. Further, all PAC contributions must be reported by both the contributing PAC itself and the recipient campaign committee.
Quite simply, Ashcroft's campaign and leadership PAC broke the law by giving and receiving a contribution that exceeded the federal contribution limit by at least 10 times and possibly by more than 200 times, and by failing to disclose the contribution in the first place.
Alliance for Democracy v. FEC
Is Our Chief Law Enforcement Officer a Criminal?by Lisa Danetz, August 28, 2003
As the top law enforcement officer of the federal government, the Attorney General of the United States has a moral duty to act with honesty and integrity, and to guard his reputation as a law-abiding citizen. This means the Attorney General must -- at the very minimum -- make sure the political committees connected to him follow the nation's campaign finance rules. Respect for the law demands no less.
So why is John Ashcroft stonewalling about charges that his 2000 Senate campaign broke the federal campaign finance law?
A coalition of voters and campaign finance reform groups filed a complaint in March 2001 with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), alleging that Ashcroft's leadership PAC, "Spirit of America," illegally contributed a fundraising list of 100,000 donors to his 2000 Senate campaign in Missouri. Neither the PAC nor the campaign committee reported the contribution.
Spirit of America developed the list of donors between 1997 and 1999 at a cost of more than $2 million, according to a press report. Upon receiving the list at no charge, the Ashcroft campaign allegedly rented the list out and made over $100,000.
If this is true, Ashcroft's PAC and campaign are in hot water on a number of counts. PACs are prohibited from contributing more than $10,000 to federal candidates in an election cycle, and campaigns are likewise prohibited from receiving such contributions. That limit includes the non-monetary donations, like the fundraising list. Further, all PAC contributions must be reported by both the contributing PAC itself and the recipient campaign committee.
Quite simply, Ashcroft's campaign and leadership PAC broke the law by giving and receiving a contribution that exceeded the federal contribution limit by at least 10 times and possibly by more than 200 times, and by failing to disclose the contribution in the first place.
Two and a half years later, the FEC has not resolved the matter, and its file remains secret -- but Ashcroft could ask to open the file to the public. Almost a year ago, a Washington federal judge ruled that plaintiffs could seek consent from Ashcroft's campaign and his leadership PAC to unseal the FEC file. If they agreed, the FEC could release the file.
The plaintiffs wrote letters asking for written consent to allow the documents in the FEC file to be released. They were ignored. Mr. Ashcroft's office also ignored numerous inquiries from the media. In response to a follow-up phone call two months after the letters were sent, Mr. Ashcroft's office confirmed he had received the letter, but again refused to respond.
A month ago, the same federal judge ordered the FEC to explain its delay in handling the matter. The judge's order sets the stage for the case to finally move forward.
Even when the issue is resolved, though, the vast majority of the FEC's file will remain secret unless the Ashcroft groups provide written consent for disclosure. Recognizing this harm, a coalition of campaign reform groups has once more called on the Attorney General to authorize the release of the FEC file. But -- no surprise here -- they, too, were ignored.
If Ashcroft is truly loyal to the rule of law, he will direct his campaign committee and Spirit of America to allow the FEC file to see daylight. Unless, of course, he has something to hide.
© 2003 Lisa Danetz
Lisa Danetz is a staff attorney at the National Voting Rights Institute and the lead counsel for the plaintiffs in Alliance for Democracy v. FEC, a case challenging the Federal Election Commission's failure to act on campaign finance violations committed by political committees controlled by Attorney General Ashcroft.