Bill Moyers reports on congressional oversight

The latest edition of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, which aired last Friday, provides an informative snapshot of congressional oversight. In particular, it covers the past year's worth of investigations conducted by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform under the leadership of Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA). The episode is available to watch online in two parts along with summaries, transcripts, and links to relevant information.

Rep. Waxman's committee has played a leading role in unraveling the Administration's abuses of power and taxpayer dollars. The Bill Moyers episode focuses on a few of the committee's more prominent investigations – including GSA administrator Lurita Doan's alleged use of her agency's resources for Republican party politics, the potentially illegal activities of Iraq contractors hired by the State Department (e.g., First Kuwaiti and Blackwater), and former State Department Inspector General Howard "Cookie" Krongard's improper ties to Blackwater.

On a more general level, the House committee's work over the past year has been to create an extensive documentation of the Administration's policies and practices. This has proven to be a monumental task considering that executive secrecy has increased dramatically under the current President. As Rep. Waxman states at the end of his interview with Moyers, "I think this administration is doing a lot, maybe all it can, to keep from being held accountable."

This is particularly true when it comes to federal contracting, which has roughly doubled over the past decade to currently $400 billion per year. Rep. Waxman notes that almost half of this amount has been distributed without open competition, thus making it difficult to determine if the government is receiving the best products and services at the lowest cost. Furthermore, this lack of competition has led to instances of corruption and kickbacks.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has certainly gone a long way towards reasserting the "oversight" function in Congress. For more information on the committee's efforts, Marc Ash, Executive Director of Truthout, also conducted an interview (video available online) with Rep. Waxman in December.

-- John Pruett

CQ: Expanded Presidential Power to Declare Martial Law Met With Silence

Summary of Congressional Quarterly article called "Fine Print in Defense Bill Opens Door to Martial Law": Congress passed a questionable provision in the Defense authorization act that greatly expands the President's power to declare martial law.  Few in Congress care or know besides Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont).  The mainstream media doesn't seem to know what's going on.  Do you?

-- Nick Schwellenbach

ABC's Path to Distortion

Since the early days of the 9/11 Commission, co-chairs Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton have repeatedly emphasized the importance of togetherness in not just searching for the truth, but applying lessons learned. The truth--at least, as the Commission views it in the 9/11 report’s introduction--essentially boils down to “failure took place over many years and Administrations,” with “no single individual responsible”. The star to steer by in moving forward, they wrote, was setting aside partisan agendas and differences, uniting “in the face of common foe…We believe that in acting together, we can make a difference.”

On September 10 and 11, ABC will air “The Path to 9/11,” a miniseries that not only claims to be a “dramatization” of the 9/11 Commission Report, but also boasts Tom Kean as a producer. At first glance, it might seem odd that after so much emphasis on the spirit of bipartisanship, it wouldn’t be both Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton sharing producer credits. But having twice now seen sneak previews of the miniseries, I have, in my mind’s eye, a picture of Lee Hamilton reviewing the script and at least telling Kean he’s on his own, at most excoriating Kean (who is, by training, a historian) for aiding and abetting a bowdlerization of history and undermining the Commission’s already arguable integrity. Far from an instrument designed to explain, enlighten, heal or engender constructive change, The Path to 9/11 more closely resembles a wedge designed to polarize and warp.

Of course, what I’ve seen may not end up being what everyone else sees. As my friend and colleague Shaun Waterman from UPI reports, the network is frantically recutting the miniseries in response to a deluge of criticism, with the network going so far as to say that specific criticisms are “premature and irresponsible,” as “no one has seen the final version of the film.” I have to say I find this a hoot: At a special National Press Club screening of Part I a few weeks ago, an ABC flack could not have been more effusive about the film, and left little doubt that what we beheld was in fact the final version. Indeed, as the network had even gone so far as to team up with educational resource manufacturer Scholastic to market the film as a teaching tool accompanied by lessons plans and discussion guides, I think it’s safe to say ABC considered its product securely in the can.

So why all the sturm und drang about The Path To 9/11? In one particularly engrossing set of sequences set in 1998,  we bounce back and forth between two very different locales:  CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where CIA Director George Tenet teleconferences via webcams with White House counterterror aide Richard Clarke and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger; and Afghanistan, where just outside Tarnak Farms a three-man CIA team and a bevy of Afghan Northern Alliance fighters--including Ahmad Shah Massoud himself!--are poised to raid the compound and snatch bin Laden.

The team on the ground is ready to move, chomping at the bit--but it's possible bin Laden could end up dead in the crossfire. Berger suddenly contends that while President Clinton had signed off on “plans,” plans are different than the actual operation. So who’s going to give the go-ahead? Berger indicates Tenet can, but Tenet objects, fearing that if the op goes bad, he’ll end up like a pilloried Janet Reno post-Waco. So will ranking mandarin Sandy Berger authorize the move, or take it to the president? He decides to do neither---and signals his decision by brusquely turning off his camera. A CIA analyst (“Patricia”) played by Amy Madigan is furious; the CIA team on the ground are beside themselves; Massoud is furious. Fast foward to months later, when al Qaeda blows up the US embassies in Dar and Nairobi--"Patrica" bursts into a meeting chaired by Tenet, fulminating through tears at Tenet, excoriating him for not pushing the operation that, had it gone forward, would have saved lives and spared destruction.

It's all amazingly powerful and affecting stuff--yet, according to Kean's 9/11 Commission and other accounts, none of it happened.

It is fact that the CIA crafted numerous plans over the years to try to get bin Laden. But as Steve Coll described in the authoritative Ghost Wars, the attempts floundered at different times for different reasons--ranging from sheer insanity of the plans themselves to operational and diplomatic considerations that scotched them. The 1998 "attempt" as portrayed by ABC does have a kernel of truth to it:  In 1997, the CIA's bin Laden station did plan a snatch operation, and it went through numerous dress rehearsals in 1997 and 1998. But as that little bipartisan body co-chaired by producer Kean found, not only did that plan get nixed well before anyone was mere yards away from bin Laden, but it's demise, though a little hazy, had more to do with concerns at CIA, and ultimately rested with Tenet, not Berger. And things certainly didn’t come to head in one late-night teleconference, according to the Report:

On May 20, Director Tenet discussed the high risk of the operation with Berger and his deputies, warning that people might be killed, including Bin Ladin. Success was to be defined as the exfiltration of Bin Ladin out of Afghanistan.28 A meeting of principals was scheduled for May 29 to decide whether the operation should go ahead.

The principals did not meet. On May 29, "Jeff" informed "Mike" that he had just met with Tenet, Pavitt, and the chief of the Directorate's Near Eastern Division. The decision was made not to go ahead with the operation. "Mike" cabled the field that he had been directed to "stand down on the operation for the time being." He had been told, he wrote, that cabinet-level officials thought the risk of civilian casualties-"collateral damage"-was too high. They were concerned about the tribals' safety, and had worried that "the purpose and nature of the operation would be subject to unavoidable misinterpretation and misrepresentation-and probably recriminations-in the event that Bin Ladin, despite our best intentions and efforts, did not survive."29

Impressions vary as to who actually decided not to proceed with the operation. Clarke told us that the CSG saw the plan as flawed. He was said to have described it to a colleague on the NSC staff as "half-assed" and predicted that the principals would not approve it. "Jeff " thought the decision had been made at the cabinet level. Pavitt thought that it was Berger's doing, though perhaps on Tenet's advice. Tenet told us that given the recommendation of his chief operations officers, he alone had decided to "turn off" the operation. He had simply informed Berger, who had not pushed back. Berger's recollection was similar. He said the plan was never presented to the White House for a decision.30

The CIA's senior management clearly did not think the plan would work. Tenet's deputy director of operations wrote to Berger a few weeks later that the CIA assessed the tribals' ability to capture Bin Ladin and deliver him to U.S. officials as low. But working-level CIA officers were disappointed. Before it was canceled, Schroen described it as the "best plan we are going to come up with to capture [Bin Ladin] while he is in Afghanistan and bring him to justice."31 No capture plan before 9/11 ever again attained the same level of detail and preparation. The tribals' reported readiness to act diminished. And Bin Ladin's security precautions and defenses became more elaborate and formidable.

At this time, 9/11 was more than three years away. It was the duty of Tenet and the CIA leadership to balance the risks of inaction against jeopardizing the lives of their operatives and agents. And they had reason to worry about failure: millions of dollars down the drain; a shoot-out that could be seen as an assassination; and, if there were repercussions in Pakistan, perhaps a coup. The decisions of the U.S. government in May 1998 were made, as Berger has put it, from the vantage point of the driver looking through a muddy windshield moving forward, not through a clean rearview mirror.32

Elsewhere in the miniseries, outright fabrication appears to be deployed in the service of justifying current--and dubious--Bush Administration practices. Perhaps the best example is the film’s treatment of the December 30, 1999 arrest in Brooklyn of Abdel Ghani Meskini, a key player in Ahmed Ressam’s failed Millennium bombing operation. In the film, we see the FBI’s John O’Neill (played by Harvey Keitel) personally leading the arrest of Meskini, and then watch as Meskini and fellow agent Neil Herman try to interrogate Meskini. Totally uncooperative and uttering nothing but Islamic prayers, Meskini won’t break as O’Neill repeatedly tries to shame him, yelling at him and asking if his parents and his God are proud of the fact that he blows up women and children. “I’d like to knock your block off,” a disgusted O’Neill finishes, then repairs to a mobile command center in Times Square wondering if midnight will come with a fresh terrorist attack. Implicit message:  How stupid to practice physical restraint with a terror suspect in a ticking time-bomb situation.

When I ran this by Jack Cloonan--the now-retired FBI agent who actually Meskini’s interrogator and is, ironically, currently a consultant to ABC News--his response was unequivocal: “That’s outrageous.” In reality, Meskini’s interrogation was a starkly different affair--and one that argues against use of torture on terror suspects. Meskini did, in fact, cooperate, and, at least in Cloonan’s view, did so because he was treated like a human being. Here, according to papers from US vs Mokhtar Haouari and Abdel Ghani Meskini, is how it actually went down:

At approximately 10:50 a.m., FBI Special Agent John Cloonan and NYPD Detective Thomas Corrigan, members of the JTTF, arrived to interview Meskini. Cloonan asked Meskini if he understood English and Meskini said that he did. …"Early on" in the interview, Cloonan and Corrigan told Meskini that he could take a break at any time to have food or soda. Meskini said that he was observing Ramadan and "couldn't take any food or water until the first sign of darkness." Corrigan also said that Meskini could take bathroom breaks "or stop to make salat, or prayer." Corrigan testified that in the Muslim practice there are prayers five times per day. …Cloonan and Corrigan interviewed Meskini from approximately 10:50 a.m. until approximately 6:50 p.m.. Meskini did not ask to pray, but he did take three or four breaks during that time. In addition, there was a dinner break at approximately 5:30 p.m., at which time Meskini was given pizza and soda in accordance with his request…

There were no promises or threats to Meskini and he made no inquiry of Corrigan or Cloonan about the procedure whereby he would be brought to court and obtain a lawyer. Meskini never asked or suggested that he wished to terminate the interview. There were two times during the interview when Corrigan and Cloonan told him that they would terminate the interview "if he didn't continue or didn't tell [them] the truth." In response, Meskini provided more details, and "got a little more serious."  At another point, "[they] were kind of joking around" and Meskini made a reference to the television program "NYPD Blue," which Corrigan took to mean that Meskini "felt that [Corrigan and Cloonan] were treating him fairly decently as opposed to some of the characters on that show." . Meskini never complained about how he was treated or that he had been coerced or threatened.

…Cloonan and Corrigan asked Meskini "if he would be willing to make a consensually monitored telephone call to Mr. Mokhtar," and Meskini "said that he would."  A consent form was read to Meskini, which he also read and signed at approximately 6:40 p.m.  In his testimony, Meskini acknowledged that an agent read him the consent form, he understood it, and he signed it of his own free will. Several calls were made and recorded. While the calls were made, a translator and three other agents were in the room with Cloonan, Corrigan, and Meskini; the translator was there because Meskini had said that he would speak to Mokhtar in Arabic. The three other agents had started to fingerprint Meskini and were waiting to finish fingerprinting and photographing him and then to transport him to the Metropolitan Correctional Center.

Additionally, if one recalls (or now for the first time reads) the Washington Post Magazine’s exhaustive and nuanced  May 20, 2001, investigative report on Meskini and the circumstances of his arrest and prosecution, the TV scenes become less the stuff of “dramatization” and more the stuff of caricature.

I suspect that Hollywood screenwriting types wouldn’t be bothered by these and other flights from reality, arguing that that a piece of drama, whatever its basis is reality, has, as its first duty, an obligation to entertain; and that the utility of a scene like the Berger teleconference is that if it doesn’t get the actual reality, it captures the spirit of things. But this still could have been achieved by hewing closer to reality, perhaps by dramatizing an earlier actual attempt by Massoud’s fighters to ambush a bin Laden convoy on the road to Kandahar. And one could have found just as much drama--and illuminatingly so--in the actual contentious discussions that took place over various bin Laden rendition plans. Similarly, there was certainly the stuff of drama in the actual Meskini interview, but to render it as it actually happened would conflict with the films’ theme:  That such approaches are not the stuff of being “at war”.

Not, says 9/11 widow Kristen Breitweiser, that any of this should come as a surprise. “We went to war on fictional information--the fact that there’s now a miniseries that presents things as fiction about 9/11 doesn’t shock me,” says Breitweiser, who, though she hasn't seen the program, isn't thrilled by what she's been hearing about it. “But this is exactly the situation we wanted to avoid. Obviously the whole reason we fought for a 9/11 commission was to get a set of facts out we could rely on historically, and that we would have those facts to learn from and have a complete understanding of that day. Unfortunately, because the record is not clear because the Commission failed to have a full and complete accounting, there’s always going to be room for different interpretations.”

-- Jason Vest