http://www.cooperativeresearch.org The Center for Grassroots Oversight aims to provide the public with a means to collaborate on investigations at the grassroots level. en-us http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a030503majidkhan#a030503majidkhan http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a030503majidkhan#a030503majidkhan According to his father, al-Qaeda operative Majid Khan is arrested by Pakistani soldiers and police at his brother Mohammed Khan's house in Karachi, Pakistan, on March 5, 2003. Both brothers are interrogated by Pakistani and US agents. Majid Khan is eventually transferred to a secret US prison and will remain there until 2006, when he will be sent to the Guantanamo prison as one of 14 "high-value" detainees . The US apparently considers Khan of high value due to his involvement in plots targeting the US. Khan moved to the US from Pakistan as a teenager in 1996 and graduated from a high school in Baltimore in 1999. According to US charges against him, he became involved in a local Islamic organization and then returned to Pakistan in 2002. An uncle and cousin who were al-Qaeda operatives drafted Khan there, and he started working for al-Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM). KSM worked with Khan because of Khan's knowledge of the US, fluency in English, and willingness to be a suicide bomber. His family owned a gas station, and he allegedly plotted to blow up gas stations and poison water supplies in the US. Paul 2008-07-06T23:29:25-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a112407isiattacked#a112407isiattacked http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a112407isiattacked#a112407isiattacked Pakistani militants attack the ISI intelligence agency and army in two simultaneous suicide bombings in the city of Rawalpindi, Pakistan. A suicide bomber crashes a car into a bus carrying ISI officials to work, killing 28 ISI officials, plus a bystander and the bomber. Ten minutes later, a second suicide bomber blows up while attempting to enter the army's General Headquarters, killing one security official and bystander, as well as the bomber. Prior to the government's raid on the Red Mosque earlier in the year (see and ), the ISI had been working closely with militant groups . Paul 2008-07-06T23:28:41-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a032383starwars#a032383starwars http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a032383starwars#a032383starwars President Reagan announces his proposal for the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, later nicknamed "Star Wars"), originally conceived two years earlier . SDI is envisioned as a wide-ranging missile defense system that, if it works, will protect the US from nuclear attacks from the Soviet Union or other countries with ballistic missiles. Reagan says, "I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrinyn says SDI will "open a new phase in the arms race." blackmax 2008-07-06T22:38:45-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a121583staunch#a121583staunch http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a121583staunch#a121583staunch The US launches Operation Staunch, advising other countries not to sell weapons to Iran to force a negotiated settlement to the Iran-Iraq war. blackmax 2008-07-06T22:35:03-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a102002nkoreawithdraw#a102002nkoreawithdraw http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a102002nkoreawithdraw#a102002nkoreawithdraw Responding to North Korea's admission that it has centrifuges necessary to produce weapons-grade uranium (see and ), President Bush announces that the US is unilaterally withdrawing from the 1994 "Agreed Framework" treaty between the US and North Korea that keeps North Korea from producing nuclear weapons. It halts oil supplies to North Korea and urges other countries to cut off all economic relations with that country. In return, Pyongyang expels the international weapons inspectors monitoring its nuclear program, restarts its nuclear reactor at Yongbyan, and resumes processing its radioactive fuel rods to produce weapons-grade plutonium. blackmax 2008-07-06T22:30:51-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=aearly0202ussnkorea#aearly0202ussnkorea http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=aearly0202ussnkorea#aearly0202ussnkorea Undersecretary of State Jim Kelly, slated to try to revive the US's attempts to negotiate with North Korea over that nation's nuclear weapons program, goes to South Korea in preparation for President Bush to visit Seoul. Kelly is fully aware that the Bush administration has gone out of its way to undermine and disrupt the Clinton-era negotiations with North Korea, and a year before had insulted then-President Kim Dae Jung over the issue . Now South Korea has a new president, Roh Moo Hyun, a populist with the same intentions of reopening a dialogue with North Korea as his predecessor. Charles Pritchard, the Bush administration's special North Korean envoy, accompanies Kelly on the visit, and later recalls: "The conversation in the streets of Seoul was, 'Is there going to be a war? What will these crazy Americans do?'" When Kelly and Pritchard meet with Roh, the president tells them, "I wake up in a sweat every morning, wondering if Bush has done something unilaterally to affect the [Korean] peninsula." Bush's visit to South Korea does little to ease tensions or convince North Korea to consider abandoning its uranium enrichment program . blackmax 2008-07-06T22:23:27-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a032201bpcheney#a032201bpcheney http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a032201bpcheney#a032201bpcheney Officials from British Petroleum, including regional president Bob Malone, meet with Vice President Cheney's energy task force (the National Energy Policy Development Group--see ). The BP representatives are part of a group of officials from some 20 different oil and drilling companies and organizations to meet with Cheney's task force in March and April. The other organizations include the National Mining Association, the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, and the American Petroleum Institute. The names of the various officials, executives, lobbyists, and representatives who meet with the task force will not be released until 2007 . In November 2005, BP America CEO Ross Pillari will testify in a Senate hearing that he does not know about any such meetings . blackmax 2008-07-06T22:17:42-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a1980beginfalwell#a1980beginfalwell http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a1980beginfalwell#a1980beginfalwell Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin seeks to expand his base of influence in the US. Israel has long enjoyed the support of liberal Democrats, so Begin begins reaching out to conservative American evangelicals who, in many cases, espouse anti-Semitic views . But more important to Begin is the fact that these conservative Christians are becoming politically active and powerful. Begin seeks out conservative televangelist and political activist Jerry Falwell, who publicly views the birth of Israel as "the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy." Falwell has often said that the friendship between the US and Israel is a cornerstone both of political stability in the Middle East and a matter of faith. Begin presents Falwell with the prestigious Jabotinsky Award, making Falwell the first non-Jew to ever receive the award. More tangibly, he also gives Falwell's ministry a private jet. blackmax 2008-07-06T22:02:23-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a100173segrettiguilty#a100173segrettiguilty http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a100173segrettiguilty#a100173segrettiguilty Donald Segretti, a former "agent provocateur" operative for the Nixon re-election campaign , pleads guilty to charges of illegal distribution of false campaign literature. He will serve six months in federal prison. blackmax 2008-07-06T22:01:21-07:00 http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a1965kristolneocons#a1965kristolneocons http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a1965kristolneocons#a1965kristolneocons Academic Irving Kristol founds a magazine, "The Public Interview," and fills it with political and social commentary by himself and his increasingly conservative followers. Kristol will later describe himself and his comrades as "liberals mugged by reality." He leads a nascent ideological movement--later turned "neoconservativism"--marked by attacks on President Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" economic policies and "New Left" thinkers. Early shapers and proponents of this new, aggressive conservatism include Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Norman Podhoretz, Diana Trilling, Seymour Martin Lipset, and Midge Decter. The more unpopular their views become with their friends and academic colleagues, the more insular and withdrawn they become. Author Craig Unger will write in 2007, "In part, their apostasy could be attributed to angst about their careers and social standing" along with their shifting political beliefs. Kristol's group tends to live, work, and socialize with one another, in an increasingly exclusive and insular group. Much of their attacks on their former liberal and counterculture friends are rooted as much in personal antipathy and a desire to avenge social slights as in ideological differences, and their attacks tend to veer away from criticism of positions and into personal invective. (Interestingly, Podhoretz once tries to convince his former friend, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, to join his neoconservative group, an effort which Ginsberg harshly repudiates. The poet later recalls Podhoretz's conversion attempt as "an epiphanous moment in my relation with Podhoretz and what he was part of--a large, right-wing, protopolice surveillance movement.") At this point, most neoconservatives still identify themselves, however reluctantly, with the Democratic Party. blackmax 2008-07-06T22:00:33-07:00