SOME INFAMOUS UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO GRADUATES
GRADUATES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
Edwin Hubble S.B. 1910 astronomer
John Gunther PhB 1922 journalist ("Inside Europe")
Norman Maclean Ph.D. 1940 author
John Paul Stevens A.B. 1941 justice, Supreme Court
David Broder A.B. 1947 journalist, Washington Post
Robert H. Bork A.B. 1948, J.D. 1953 federal judge
Andrew Marshall A.M. 1949 dir., Office of Net Assessment, Dept. of Defense
Allan Bloom A.B. 1949 social critic, student of Leo Strauss
Ramsey Clark A.M. 1950, J.D. 1951 U.S. attorney general
Beryl Sprinkel MBA 1952 chair, Council of Economic Advisors
Gary Becker A.M. 1953, Ph.D. 1955 Nobel Prize, Economics 1992
Seymour Hersh A.B. 1958 investigative reporter (My Lai, Perle, Abu Ghraib), NYT, New Yorker
James Hormel J.D. 1958 U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg
Leon Kass S.B. 1958 M.D., 1962 [neo-con] chair, President's Council on Bioethics
Larry Ellison Ex. 1966 CEO, Oracle
Abram Shulsky M.A. 1966, Ph.D. 1972 [neo-con] dir., Pentagon Off. of Special Plans, student of Leo Strauss & Allan Bloom
John Ashcroft J.D. 1967 [neo-con] U.S. attorney general
Ahmed Chalabi Ph.D. 1969 [neo-con] leader, Iraqi Nat. Cong., student of Wohlstetter
Robert Pirsig "Zen and Art of Motorcycle" novelist
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. A.M. 1971 novelist
Robert Barnett J.D. 1971 top Washington lawyer, book agent, advisor to politicians
Paul D. Wolfowitz Ph.D. 1972 [neo-con] U.S. dep. sec. of def., student of Wohlstetter, Leo Strauss, & Allan Bloom
Jon S. Corzine MBA 1973 U.S. senator
Michael Mobbs J.D. 1974 advisor, Dept. of Defense Detainee Policy Group
Jeremiah Wright A.M. 1975 Paster of Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago
William J. Bennett J.D. 1975 [neo-con] U.S. secretary of education
Gary Schmitt M.A. 1976, Ph.D. 1980 [neo-con] exec. dir., Project for the New American Century (PNAC)
David Axelrod A.B. 1976 political consultant, top adviser to Barack Obama 2004 & 2008
Zalmay Khalilzad Ph.D. 1978 [neo-con] counsellor to Sec. Rumsfeld, ambas. Iraq, student of Wohlstetter
David Kessler J.D. 1978 commissioner, U.S. Food & Drug Admin.
Daniel Levin J.D. 1981 senior lawyer, Dept. of Justice, fought W.H. on legalization of torture (2004)
Gary Edson J.D. 1982 Deputy National Security Advisor to Pres. Bush
John Podhoretz A.B. 1982 [neo con] editor, New York Post, student of Leo Strauss
David Brooks A.B. 1983 columnist, NYT and NPR
James Comey J.D. 1985 Dep. Attorney-General, refused to certify NSA domestic surveillance (2004)
Joshua Cooper Ramo A.B. 1992 senior editor, Time
James C. Ho J.D. 1999 [neo-con] Justice Dept., wrote opinion that Taliban/al-Qaida outside Geneva Conv.
We have specific fears about what would happen in a second Bush term, particularly regarding the Supreme Court. The record so far gives us plenty of cause for worry. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous Justice Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush selection, J. Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives must be subordinate to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to Nazis.
The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management. The Department of Education's handling of the No Child Left Behind Act has been heavily politicized and inept. The Department of Homeland Security is famous for its useless alerts and its inability to distribute antiterrorism aid according to actual threats. Without providing enough troops to properly secure Iraq, the administration has managed to so strain the resources of our armed forces that the nation is unprepared to respond to a crisis anywhere else in the world. [NYT editorial, 17 Oct 2004]
Editorial in The New York Times:
Bush Was Utterly Incoherent [NYT, 9 Oct 2004]
In reaction to Bush's astonishing reference to the Dred Scott case:
"I am relieved to hear that George Bush won't appoint judges
who might reinstitute slavery." [Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), 10 Oct]
Scorched-Earth Strategy:
After a terrible week for his campaign, Bush has one agenda
between now and election day: Attack Kerry [NewsWeek, 8 Oct]
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Sensational report: New book by Kitty Kelly -- quoting ex-wife of Neil Bush and others -- claims that President Bush used cocaine at Camp David. [Boston Globe, 7 Sep 2004] |
THE AWOL PROJECT:
An Examination of the Bush Military Files [Paul Lukasiak, 8 Sep 2004]
Summary of current knowledge:
Up-to-the-minute details of Bush's flakey Nat. Guard service [Salon, 9 Sep]
Low-key and thorough analysis:
GOP Resident George W. Bush AWOL? [Sawyer, Sep '04]
View of the New York Times:
Special Treatment for Bush in Guard [NYT, 9 Sep]
While working for Plaut campaign:
Details of Bush's missing Nat. Guard-duty year [Salon, 2 Sep]
Texas official now ashamed:
Video: "I got Bush into the Texas Air Nat. Guard." [Salon, 27 Aug]
How did America get into this Iraqi mess?
(Answer: The neo-cons introduced an aberrant, crazy ideology into Republican leadership.)
O M I N O U S Q U O T E S Douglas Feith (boss of OSP):
"The purpose of intelligence is not truth but victory." [1998]Michael Ledeen (consultant for OSP):
Feith memo 20 Sept. 2001 to Gen. Hugh Seldon: "Feith expressed disappointment at the limited options immediately available in Afghanistan and the lack of ground options. The author suggested instead hitting terrorists outside the Middle East in the initial offensive, perhaps deliberately selecting a non-al Qaida target like Iraq. Since U.S. attacks were expected in Afghanistan, an American attack in South America or Southeast Asia might be a surprise to the terrorists." [9/11 Report, 2004]
Feith op. ed. piece, Wash. Post: "The first U.S. strikes could serve additional objectives:
• ...
• Show seriousness of U.S. military purpose, to potential allies as well as to enemies, to make clear that the United States was now prosecuting a war.
• ..." [Washington Post, 7 Aug. 2004]
"The United States every ten years or so needs to pick up some crummy little country and throw it against the wall just to prove to the world that we mean business." [2003]
(Earlier called "Near East and South Asia Office")
Office of Special Plans, Pentagon
(After July 2003 called "Northern Gulf Affairs Office")The Office of Special Plans (OSP) was created by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld to help create a case to invade Iraq. OSP evolved from the Northern Gulf Affairs Office, which fell under the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia policy office. It was renamed and expanded to the Office of Special Plans in October 2002 to to handle prewar and postwar planning. The name change was done to 'mask' its true mission.
[http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/politics/ny-uspent123411141aug12,0,4096688.story]The director of the Special Plans operation is Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss, late professor at the University of Chicago. Shulsky has been quietly working on intelligence and foreign-policy issues for three decades; he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early nineteen-eighties and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard N. Perle during the Ronald Reagan Administration, after which he joined the RAND Corporation.
[Seymour M. Hersh, "Selective Intelligence", The New Yorker, May 12, 2003]Despite extensive planning by the U.S. Department of State's Future of Iraq Project to deal with post-Saddam chaos, much of which (including museum looting and extensive water and power shortages) was fully anticipated and provided for in those plans, these plans were simply set aside by Rumsfeld.
[http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/politics/ny-uspent123411141aug12,0,4096688.story]Air Force Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in the Pentagon until her retirement, was with the Office of Special Plans: "What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline," Kwiatkowski wrote recently. "If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense." She described the activities of Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans as, "A subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress."
[http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/politics/ny-uspent123411141aug12,0,4096688.story][In July 2003] due to ever increasing criticism about the role OSP has played in the gathering of intelligence and the conclusions made to justify the war with Iraq, the Pentagon changed the name of OSP back to its original name, Northern Gulf Affairs Office.
[http://www.newsday.com/news/local/longisland/politics/ny-uspent123411141aug12,0,4096688.story]Julian Borger, in his July 17, 2003 article "The spies who pushed for war," published by the Guardian/UK, writes that Democratic congressman David Obey said concerning the OSP: "The office was charged with collecting, vetting and disseminating intelligence completely outside of the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the president without having been vetted with anyone other than political appointees."
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html]On March 9, 2004, Los Angeles Times' staff reporter Greg Miller writes that during testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, George J. Tenet, Director of the CIA, revealed that "A special intelligence unit at the Pentagon provided private prewar briefings to senior White House officials on alleged ties between Iraq and Al-Qaida without the knowledge of [the] CIA Director ... [and the] disclosure suggests that a controversial Pentagon office played a greater role than previously understood in shaping the administration's views on Iraq's alleged ties to the terrorist network behind the Sept. 11 attacks, and that it bypassed usual channels to make a case that conflicted with the conclusions of CIA analysts."
[http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/latimes92.html]In her 4-page article "The New Pentagon Papers" published March 10, 2004, by Salon, Karen Kwiatkowski, "reveals how Defense Department extremists suppressed information and twisted the truth to drive the country to war."
[http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp_moveon/index.html]
Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, in their January 26, 2004, Mother Jones article, write:
[http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/iraq/1448.html]The Lie Factory
Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story for how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war.
...Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, 43, now a retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit (later called the Office of Special Plans) during the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence -- it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials-including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February -- that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war....
...As the momentum for war [in Iraq] began to build in early 2002, Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric Office of Special Plans, or OSP; the new unit's director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, David Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon, who was in charge of the State Department's disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky's OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts -- including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt -- who, despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House.
According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, Luti and Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. "It was organized like a machine," she says. "The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission." At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began "hot-desking," or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaida. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. "Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House," she adds.
Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to Scooter right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than I. Lewis Scooter Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.
"Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office."
Although Feith insists that the OSP did not seek to gather its own intelligence, Kwiatkowski and others sharply disagree. Staff working for Luti and Shulsky in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style intelligence, she says. As an example, she cited the work of a U.S. intelligence officer and Arabic specialist, Navy Lt. Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, who was a special assistant to Luti. "His job was to peruse the Arabic-language media to find articles that would incriminate Saddam Hussein about terrorism, and he translated these." Such raw intelligence is usually subject to a thorough vetting process, tracked, verified, and checked by intelligence professionals. But not at OSP -- the material that it produced found its way directly into speeches by Bush, Cheney, and other officials....
Leadership of the Office of Special Plans
[http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/iraq/1448.html]
Paul Dundes Wolfowitz, OSP architect
Douglas Jay Feith, Undersecretary of Defense (OSP reports to Feith)
Steven A. Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence
Abram N. Shulsky, Director of Office of Special Plans
William Luti, Under Secretary of Defense who "oversees the OSP"
Who is Steven Cambone? Rumsfeld's Intelligence Takeover Power Grab [New Republic, 10 Jun 2004]
What does "Anonymous" say about OSP? State Department's Extreme Makeover [Salon, 4 Oct]"The weapons of mass destruction disinformation that was fed to the president and to the American public came directly from Shulsky's shop [the Office of Special Plans, OSP] ...."
Daniel Ellsberg ("The Pentagon Papers") at 73 is still alive and kicking. Recent news --
San Francisco Chronicle, February 29, 2004More of Ellsberg's views here.
Ellsberg: "I will be happily surprised if there isn't a major terrorist attack in the U. S. in the next four years, and if Bush is in office [when this happens], I think this country will shift to something very close to fascism. Ashcroft and Cheney will use an attack as an excuse to implement police controls far beyond any we've seen. That's why we need to demand a return to the Constitution and Bill of Rights now, before it's too late. Guantanamo is a concentration camp by every historic standard, but in the future there may be scores of them, and not only for Middle Easterners."
Associated Press, September 10, 2004
WASHINGTON - Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam war, is urging government insiders to provide similar classified documents about the invasion of Iraq. Joined by other whistle-blowers and former government employees, Ellsberg said at a news conference Thursday that claims of government deception and lies have "little credibility" unless supported by documentary evidence, which often is available only in classified materials. In a memo to current government employees, Ellsberg and other former government officials said federal insiders owe a "higher allegiance" to the Constitution, the public and American soldiers in Iraq than to their government bosses.
New York Times headline, 6 Aug. 2004:As Prof. James K. Galbraith sees it: What Economic Recovery? [Salon.com, 08 Oct]"Job Growth Grinds Nearly to Halt in July, Labor Dept. Reports"
George W. Bush in New Hampshire, 6 Aug. 2004:"Today's employment report shows our economy is continuing to move forward," Bush told the crowd in the only Northeastern state he won in the 2000 election.Bush's remarks followed the release of new figures showing the nation's economy added 32,000 jobs in July, representing the smallest gain in hiring since December. Analysts were expecting the economy to add anywhere from 215,000 to 247,000 jobs in July. Monthly job growth of 200,000 to 300,000 is regarded by many economists as a yardstick for healthy economic recovery. In addition to the meager job gain for July, the government revised the June employment report, showing a gain of just 78,000 jobs, even less than previously reported. May's payrolls also were revised down to show a gain of 208,000. [Associated Press]
Bush Officials Weaken
Organic Food StandardsChanges Made With Zero Public Input
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