CHICAGO - Little in Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich’s background prepared the people of Illinois for the man who was revealed in the criminal complaint that dropped like a bombshell here on Tuesday. Delusional, narcissistic, vengeful and profane, Mr. Blagojevich as portrayed by federal prosecutors shocked even his most ardent detractors.
‘I was speechless and sickened,’ says a critic of disgraced Gov. Blagojevich
“I almost fell over,” said Cindi Canary, executive director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform and a frequent critic of the governor. “I was speechless and sickened. In all of the millions of indictments I’ve read over the last years, I can’t remember anything as vile as this.”
Mike Jacobs, a Democratic state senator and former friend of the governor, suggested that Mr. Blagojevich may have lost his grip on reality.
“I’m not sure he’s playing with a full deck anymore,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I think he brought a lot of this on himself. He’s so gifted, but so flawed in a number of fundamental areas. It’s like he dared the feds to come get him.”
Drama and suspicion
Drama and suspicion have long surrounded Mr. Blagojevich, a 51-year-old Democrat known locally for his quirky love of Elvis and a big black signature hairstyle of his own. Though he ran for office as a reformer, he has been embroiled for years in a federal investigation into hiring fraud that included multiple departments under his purview.
More recently, his reputation was left badly damaged after the corruption trial of the political fund-raiser Antoin Rezko, who was convicted in June of fraud and bribery among other charges. Mr. Blagojevich’s name and administration surfaced again and again during Mr. Rezko’s highly publicized trial in Chicago. The governor’s approval rating, according to The Chicago Tribune, had sunk to 13 percent.
Yet, despite what looked like his lead role over many years in a political theater of the absurdly corrupt, Mr. Blagojevich, the seemingly earnest son of a Serbian steelworker, was not charged with any wrongdoing. Rumors swirled, and denials were issued.
Tuesday changed all that. It was not simply the extortion and venality with which he was charged that left mouths gaping, but the ruthlessness and grandiosity revealed in the federal wiretap transcripts, even as he knew he was being investigated.
“You might have thought in that environment that pay to play would slow down,” the United States attorney in Chicago, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said at a news conference announcing the charges. “The opposite happened: it sped up. Governor Blagojevich and others were working furiously to get as much money from contractors, shaking them down, pay to play, before the end of the year.”
In the words of Dick W. Simpson, head of the political science department at the University of Illinois, Chicago, and a former city alderman: “It’s over the top, even for the governor.”
Figuring out the pathology
Ms. Canary, the reform advocate, said she was trying to figure out the pathology that might explain such actions because they are not part of the classic style of Chicago corruption.
“He was raised in the old Chicago ward system where the most important principle is loyalty,” she said. “It’s about protecting one another, spreading perks, and earning personal power. It’s not about huge personal enrichment.”
But that, according to the 76-page criminal complaint, seems to be exactly what Mr. Blagojevich, who cast himself as a man of the people, was after.
Whatever his current motivation, he came into office with a very different persona. As a young congressman representing the North Side of Chicago, Mr. Blagojevich was pegged as a rising star with a populist touch. Undistinguished as a lawmaker but with proven likability in and out of Chicago, he seemed hellbent on pushing reform and cleaning house in a state with an embarrassingly overt culture of political corruption.
Running on a do-good theme as a candidate of change, he swept into the governor’s office earlier this decade mainly on promises that he would be different, that he would restore integrity to the governor’s office after the previous chief executive, George Ryan, was sentenced to six and a half years in federal prison for racketeering and fraud.
“Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, Illinois has voted for change,” he told a crowd at his victory party on election night in 2002.
‘Stuck’ as governor
Back then, it was not a secret that Mr. Blagojevich had big dreams for himself that included the White House. The federal complaint suggested that he was disenchanted with being “stuck” as governor, and had his eyes still trained on the presidency — in 2016, since 2008 was a lost cause.
Kent Redfield, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois at Springfield, said Mr. Blagojevich had clearly come into office believing he was destined for bigger things, and may have been tripped up by that ambition.
“The combination of arrogance and stupidity that would prompt him to continue in these types of behaviors is just stunning,” Dr. Redfield said. “There’s no feedback loop or reality check.”
Mr. Blagojevich had grown increasingly isolated in recent years, particularly from his own state’s Legislature and even from his father-in-law, Dick Mell, a powerful longtime Chicago alderman who showed him the political ropes as a younger man.
The governor was rarely seen around his offices in Chicago and Springfield, preferring instead to spend time at home on the North Side.
“I believe he became a prisoner of his own home,” Mr. Jacobs said.
Dr. Redfield said he had little sympathy for a man who regarded “the state of Illinois like it’s a big Chicago ward, where a U.S. Senate seat is like granting a zoning variance or liquor license.”
He added: “The damage to the state, it’s going to take a long time to dig out.”
This article, “A Portrait of a Politician: Vengeful and Profane,” was first published in The New York Times.
As President-elect Obama works to make good on his promise to shut down Guantanamo Bay, including the military commissions system that his predecessor put in place, and which has become the butt of worldwide ridicule, the Defense Department’s close-knit circle of neoconservatives is busy laying traps and bombs to obstruct Obama’s plans. Their objectives are clear: they want to push the process of the commissions as far as they possibly can so that by January 20, Obama is presented with a fait accompli. This strategy has led, among other things, to the extraordinary meeting arranged among defendants at Gitmo to push them into guilty pleas; next, I expect to hear still more charges and cases announced in advance of the transition in power in Washington. But of course if the 9/11 defendants really do want to plead guilty, that’s all the more reason for this to occur in a federal court context, where the process and the punishment stand some chance of being viewed credibly by the world. Adam Zagorin at Time reports:
Carrying the banner for that process is Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartmann, 53, a lawyer and Air Force reservist who as the top legal adviser and chief administrator of the trials, has managed to put 17 complex war crimes cases on the docket in less than 18 months. Now, Obama’s promise to shutter the facility seems to have spurred Hartmann to even greater activity. Motions and hearings are currently underway in at least half a dozen cases, and this week Gitmo authorities will host an emotional, made-for-TV moment: the first-ever visit to the trials by families of the victims of Sept. 11. Meanwhile, Hartmann’s office confirms that more terrorism trials will be announced sometime before Obama’s inauguration.
After years during which prisoners were held without trial, the question is whether this surge in prosecutions and publicity is a case of due process finally starting to work—or a hurried effort designed to tie Obama’s hands as he tries to shut the facility. Once they are under way, Obama could find it politically and legally difficult to stop the controversial proceedings or shift them out of Guantanamo.
For the past year, Hartmann has consistently defended himself against criticism by saying that he is simply doing the bidding of his bosses—in particular the neocon general counsel of the Department of Defense, Jim Haynes, who recently left to assume a middle-management post at Chevron, and his successor, Daniel J. Dell’Orto. Now Hartmann is reportedly the subject of an internal probe into possible ethics violations connected with his management of the Guantanamo caseload (which resulted in three separate military judges requiring his removal from the cases they oversaw).
All of this shows that the Bush Administration has saved the best act in its Guantanamo puppet theater for last, adding at least a touch of drama to the Texan’s protracted recessional. Today, Bush Gitmo apologists Ben Wittes and Jack Goldsmith tell us in a piece in Slate that Obama will soon be sympathizing with Bush because his options on the many “hard questions” that confront him will not allow him to deviate as much from the Bush line as he may hope. They warn that if the trials move to federal court, defendants might actually be acquitted (an outcome which they apparently believe can be foreclosed entirely in a military commissions process, which notoriously was the view of Goldsmith’s erstwhile boss, Jim Haynes) or get short sentences. The pair disclose a distinctly low level of confidence in the federal criminal justice system. And Wittes advises that he is serving as an advisor to the Obama transition team, to boot. Meanwhile at Salon, Ben Wizner and Jameel Jaffer take a different approach, urging Obama to stick to his guns.
I find it amazing that seemingly serious folk like Wittes and Goldsmith are so quick to embrace or at least try to salvage elements of the Bush regime and so dismissive of the idea of justice. I believe the system and approaches the United States had in place before the Bush tinkering began are more than adequate to the task and enjoy broad international recognition. In the end, the role of justice cannot be read into the margins without serious repercussions both to America’s image and security. Indeed, looking over the wasteland of eight years of Bush legal machinations, the contempt his administration has for justice is unmistakable.
Remember that long-ago news conference when George W. Bush couldn’t think of any mistakes he had made? Unbelievably, he still can’t.
When ABC’s Charles Gibson, interviewing Bush at Camp David, asked the president what one “do-over” he’d like to have, this was Bush’s reply:
“I don’t know—the biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein. It wasn’t just people in my administration; a lot of members in Congress, prior to my arrival in Washington, D.C., during the debate on Iraq; a lot of leaders of nations around the world were all looking at the same intelligence. And, you know, that’s not a do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess.”
Fellow sufferers from Bush Derangement Syndrome, mind your blood pressure. Just seven more weeks. Hang in there, because there are two more snippets from the interview that I have to quote.
When Gibson asked whether there would have been an Iraq war if Bush had known that Hussein had no WMDs, Bush replied: “You know, that’s an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can’t do. It’s hard for me to speculate.” And when Gibson asked Bush to name his greatest accomplishment, he got this response: “I keep recognizing we’re in a war against ideological thugs and keeping America safe.”
Observe the astounding selectivity of the president’s memory. Just imagine all the do-overs he could have asked for. He might regret not paying more attention to the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing memo, which was titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” and reported “patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.” He might wish he hadn’t put the nation’s emergency response capability in the hands of Michael Brown, a former executive of the International Arabian Horse Association, and then watched from afar as New Orleans drowned. The president might have volunteered, as he did in a previous interview, that his “Mission Accomplished” photo op on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln was a moment he’d like to have back.
But no. Instead, he told Gibson that his “biggest regret” was a mistake made by others: intelligence analysts who got it wrong about Iraq.
The only inference we can draw is that if the intelligence had been more skeptical of Hussein’s WMD prowess, there might not have been an Iraq war. Bush’s “hard for me to speculate” dodge notwithstanding, this seems to be the story the outgoing administration wants to tell. Karl Rove recently sounded this same revisionist theme, saying that “absent weapons of mass destruction” there probably would have been no invasion.
But there was plenty of skeptical intel about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, particularly its nuclear program—the potential “mushroom cloud” that Condoleezza Rice so chillingly evoked. Shaky or ambiguous reports—such as the bogus document about Iraq’s attempt to buy yellowcake uranium ore in Niger—were presented as gospel. International nuclear inspectors, meanwhile, were inside Iraq, doing their job.
There’s another problem with the way Bush is trying to rewrite history. After U.S. forces combed Iraq for WMDs and established that none existed, the administration came up with other backdated rationales for the invasion. Vice President Cheney even kept insisting there was some link to Sept. 11 that only he could perceive; after a while, nobody paid him any attention.
Bush spoke of having liberated Iraqis from the savage rule of a tyrant—which is true, but that wasn’t the reason we were originally told we had to go to war. The president spoke of having created a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, one that would shoot out tendrils of freedom to take root throughout the region—which is a hard story to sell when the war’s greatest geopolitical impact has been to strengthen theocratic Iran to the point that it dares to dream of ancient Persian glory.
Bush pats himself on the back for keeping his eye on the ball—the “war against ideological thugs.” But those ideological thugs are ensconced somewhere, probably in the lawless frontier territories of Pakistan, rebuilding their murderous networks and plotting new attacks. I’m betting that they don’t regret Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, either.
WASHINGTON (CNN)—Terrorists are likely to use a weapon of mass destruction somewhere in the world in the next five years, a blue-ribbon panel assembled by Congress has concluded.
They are more likely to use a biological weapon than a nuclear one—and the results could be devastating, the chairman of the commission told CNN.
“The consequences of a biological attack are almost beyond comprehension. It would be 9/11 times 10 or a hundred in terms of the number of people who would be killed,” former Sen. Bob Graham said.
He cited the flu virus that killed millions of people in 1918 as an example.
“Today it is still in the laboratory, but if it should get out and into the hands of scientists who knew how to use it for a violent purpose, we could have multiple times the 40 million people who were killed 100 years ago,” he said.
The U.S. government “needs to move more aggressively to limit” the spread of biological weapons, the commission said in its report.
Graham warned that such measures would be costly, but were necessary.
“The leadership of this country and the world will have to decide how much of a priority ... they place on avoiding the worst weapons in the world getting in the hands of the worst people in the world,” he said.
“It is not going to be cheap. It is not going to be accomplished without some sacrifices. It won’t be accomplished without putting this issue ahead of some other competing national and international goals. But I think our safety and security depend upon doing so,” he added.
Graham said a biological attack was more likely than a nuclear one because it would be easier to carry out.
Biological weapons “are more available,” he said. “Anthrax is a natural product of dead animals. Other serious pathogens are available in equally accessible forms.”
“There are so many scientists who have the skills to convert a pathogen from benign, helpful purposes into an illicit, very harmful weapon,” he added.
But the commission warned that there is also a threat of nuclear terrorism, both because more countries are developing nuclear weapons and because some existing nuclear powers are expanding their arsenals.
“Terrorist organizations are intent on acquiring nuclear weapons,” said the report, which was published Tuesday on the Internet and will be officially released Wednesday.
CNN obtained a copy of the report Monday evening.
It cited testimony before the commission from former Sen. Sam Nunn, who said that the “risk of a nuclear weapon being used today is growing, not receding.”
The report recommends a range of measures, including increased security and awareness at biological research labs and strengthening international treaties against the spread of biological and nuclear weapons.
“Many biological pathogens and nuclear materials around the world are poorly secured—and thus vulnerable to theft by those who would put these materials to harmful use, or would sell them on the black market to potential terrorists,” the report warned.
The commission expressed particular concern about the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea, and about Pakistan, which it described as “the intersection of nuclear weapons and terrorism.”
While observing that Pakistan is a U.S. ally, the report said, “the next terrorist attack against the United States is likely to originate from within the Federally Administered Tribal Areas” in Pakistan. The tribal areas lie in northwest Pakistan where the government exerts little control; the United States says it is a haven for militants from both Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan.
Congress created the commission to investigate and report on WMD and terrorism in line with a recommendation from the 9/11 Commission, which compiled a report on the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Commissioners heard testimony from more than 250 experts from around the world over the course of their six-month investigation.
World Leaders Don’t Shake Bush’s Hand At G20 Summit (VIDEO)
It appears in this video that President Bush’s approval is in a sorrier state than polls indicate. In a video taken at the G20 summit, Bush walks across a line of world leaders without shaking or being asked to shake any of their hands. Whether the President is being rejected by the world leaders or he is rejecting them, CNN’s Rick Sanchez aptly says that Bush looks like “the most unpopular kid in high school that nobody liked.”
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