Re: [OT] What Is "Terrorism?"

[Catherine Woodgold]

> On 7 Jul 2003 20:11:53 -0700, (Kane)
> wrote:
>
>>
>>They got caught with their hand in the cookie jar somehow, and the US
>>called them on it. And I want us to continue our current course in
>>Iraq until it is truly a free country or proves itself to be
>>unrecoverable. Which ever.

It's my understanding that the people in charge of the U.S.
government do not intend either to promote or to allow
free, democratic elections in Iraq.
--
Cathy

[toto]

On 11 Jul 2003 11:45:14 GMT, (Catherine
Woodgold) wrote:

>>>They got caught with their hand in the cookie jar somehow, and the US
>>>called them on it. And I want us to continue our current course in
>>>Iraq until it is truly a free country or proves itself to be
>>>unrecoverable. Which ever.
>
>It's my understanding that the people in charge of the U.S.
>government do not intend either to promote or to allow
>free, democratic elections in Iraq.
>--
>Cathy

I think that we have to wait and see about that. I do find it
interesting that Noah Feldman (who grew up in an Orthodox
Jewish household) has been appointed to lead the writing of
the new Constitution. His qualifications are actually good and
he seems not to be opposed to the possibility that an Islamic
government may be able to implement such a democracy
which is highly unusual among those who advise Bush.
Whether or not he is allowed any power and whether or not
the Shi'ites and Sunnis will cooperate with him remains to be
seen. If he can bring this off, it would certainly change the
middle east and much of the world, for that matter.

Some information about Feldman here:

http://tribunetimes.com/news/opinion/2003/06/10/200306108143.htm

The interesting part of the article to me is this quote:

In Feldman's book, "After Jihad: America and the Struggle for
Islamic Democracy," he argues that one of the biggest
problems with U.S. policy in the region over the years has
been a Machiavellian willingness to support thugs so long as
they were pro-American.

"Western governments that pride themselves on their own
democratic character ... embrace dictators for reasons of
short-term self-interest, forgetting that in the long run the
support of autocracy undermines their own democratic values
and makes enemies of the people who are being oppressed
with Western complicity."

It is hardly a new critique, but it is significant for its timeliness
and considering that it is coming from someone who may
have strong influence in his work in the Office of
Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, where he
works on political modeling of a reconstructed Iraq.


--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..
Outer Limits

[Chris]

toto > wrote in message >...
> On 11 Jul 2003 11:45:14 GMT, (Catherine
> Woodgold) wrote:
>
> >>>They got caught with their hand in the cookie jar somehow, and the US
> >>>called them on it. And I want us to continue our current course in
> >>>Iraq until it is truly a free country or proves itself to be
> >>>unrecoverable. Which ever.
> >
> >It's my understanding that the people in charge of the U.S.
> >government do not intend either to promote or to allow
> >free, democratic elections in Iraq.
> >--
> >Cathy
>
> I think that we have to wait and see about that.

The US occupying forces just called off elections a week or so
ago. The "problem" is that if an actual democratic election were
held, the sort of government likely to be voted in would likely not be
the sort of government the US elite wants to see in a country with the
world's second largest oil reserves.

> I do find it
> interesting that Noah Feldman (who grew up in an Orthodox
> Jewish household) has been appointed to lead the writing of
> the new Constitution.

But, in a truly "democratic" Iraq, shouldn't Iraqis themselves be
electing representatives who will draft a constitution rather than
someone handpicked by the occupying forces, however good his
qualifications may be?

> His qualifications are actually good and
> he seems not to be opposed to the possibility that an Islamic
> government may be able to implement such a democracy
> which is highly unusual among those who advise Bush.
> Whether or not he is allowed any power and whether or not
> the Shi'ites and Sunnis will cooperate with him remains to be
> seen. If he can bring this off, it would certainly change the
> middle east and much of the world, for that matter.

I hope you are right, Dorothy, but given the USA's past history
in the region I am extremely pessimistic. The USA has a long history
of hostility towards "democracy" in Arab countries, at least in my
dictionary's sense of the word.

> Some information about Feldman here:
>
> http://tribunetimes.com/news/opinion/2003/06/10/200306108143.htm
>
> The interesting part of the article to me is this quote:
>
> In Feldman's book, "After Jihad: America and the Struggle for
> Islamic Democracy," he argues that one of the biggest
> problems with U.S. policy in the region over the years has
> been a Machiavellian willingness to support thugs so long as
> they were pro-American.

Saddam Hussein himself is a classic example of this tradition.
We hear about how he killed his own people with chemical weapons, but
it is seldom mentioned in the mainstream US press that the USA sent
him the chemical precursors necessary to make those weapons. And
after he massacred thousands of Kurds in Hallabja, back in 1988,
Donald Rumsfeld personally flew to Baghdad to shake that mass
murderer's hand for a photo op.

We also sent Saddam live strains of anthrax and botulism for use
in making biological weapons. After the Gulf War, these exact same
strains were found being used in his biological weapons program.

> "Western governments that pride themselves on their own
> democratic character ... embrace dictators for reasons of
> short-term self-interest, forgetting that in the long run the
> support of autocracy undermines their own democratic values
> and makes enemies of the people who are being oppressed
> with Western complicity."

In the USA, civil liberties and privacy are under attack by the
administration of a President who was not elected, but got into power
by means of a judicial coup. In at least two cases that I am aware
of, US citizens are being held without charges and without access to
lawyers in flagrant violation of their civil rights, not to mention
hundreds of non-citizens in Guantanamo Bay. Once the proposed PATRIOT
II draft legislation becomes law, the government will have the power
to strip any US citizen of their citizenship and treat them just like
the other Guantanomo detainees.

This is the "democratic character" with which America "prides"
itself.


Chris (USA)

[Chris]

This is it. This is what war is really all about.

Chris (USA)


http://www.app.com/app2001/story/0,21133,765265,00.html

'I'm Hurting Right Now, Mom'
As war deaths mount, Toms River family waits for son's return
By Michael Amsel
The Asbury Park Press (New Jersey)

Sunday 13 July 2003

Spc. Shaun Cunningham always prided himself on his mental toughness.
As a chemical operations specialist with an Army field hospital near
Baghdad, Cunningham saw the horrific realities of the war, helping retrieve
bodies of fallen comrades from the field, shooting several enemy fighters in
gunbattles, trying his best not to be shocked at the level of violence he
witnessed.

But this was too much to bear.

At his feet were three U.S. soldiers who had been killed when their UH-60
Black Hawk helicopter crashed into the Tigris River. One body was nearly
decapitated. It was Cunningham's job to clean them up and put them in body
bags so they could be shipped back to the United States for proper funerals.

As Cunningham searched their pockets, looking for IDs, he realized he'd
met the men; they were flight medics he had helped outfit with protective
gear. A knot formed in his throat. Then, he came upon pictures of their
children and tears welled in his eyes.

"That's when the war really hit home with him," said his father, Richard
Cunningham.

As the war fades from our collective consciousness, families like the
Cunninghams of Toms River wait and worry, hoping their sons and
daughters will return home safely, and the nightmare will end. Each day, the
pain and longing gets more excruciating.

And the death toll mounts. Since the war with Iraq started March 19, at least
210 U.S. fighters have died. At least 80 have died since President Bush
declared an end to major combat on May 1.

Gen. Tommy Franks gave a stark assessment of the situation late last
week, warning that U.S. troops may have to remain in Iraq for another four
years. Each day, it seems, another U.S. soldier gets killed in a firefight or a
sneak attack.

Letters and e-mails from overseas bring comfort to concerned parents, but
they often carry with them images of abject horror. Images hard to stomach.

Poignant letter

Two weeks ago, Richard and Kathleen Cunningham received a letter dated
May 9 from Shaun, a 1997 graduate of Toms River High School East. He
wrote about a helicopter striking a power line before going down in the Tigris
River and told of the trauma he felt putting men into body bags.

"I had blood all over me, and all I could think about was this guy's wife and
kids who were in his wallet staring at me," Cunningham wrote. "I'm hurting
right now, mom, and I just needed to write and vent my feelings. The war is
over? Yeh, tell that to these guys' families."

Kathleen Cunningham said she can stomach the graphic detail of her
son's letters; it's the uncertainty of his future that gnaws at her insides.

"My heart breaks that my son has to see and endure things like that,"
Cunningham said. "I keep thinking: Will he be able to put all he has seen
aside when he comes home and live a normal life? These soldiers are
seeing so much, experiencing so much, I just don't know if they will be able
to go forward. I sincerely hope the Army helps them with therapy because
they certainly will need it."

Shannon Cunningham said she feels "beyond proud" when she reads her
brother's letters.

"It's overwhelming. There is no other way to say it," said Cunningham, 20. "I
never thought I would read stuff like that, written by my brother. I can't tell you
how proud I am of the things he has done."

The past week has been especially grueling for the Cunningham family.
Shaun is with the 21st Combat Support Hospital, A Company, in Balad, just
north of Baghdad, and his camp, Anaconda, has been under constant attack.

Friday, a female soldier in his camp committed suicide by shooting herself
in the stomach. Shaun e-mailed his parents about the suicide and said his
comrades are "getting real scared."

In another e-mail, dated July 8, Shaun wrote: "We have been getting hit with
mortars every night, and they are rocking the camp!!!! There was a major
gunbattle last night, and I got to take part in it. No one was hurt on our side,
but we killed many Iraqi. For the first time since I have been over here, I was
a little scared, with all the rounds coming in. Some people are having trouble
sleeping and are developing the shakes. Not me, though."

Later in the e-mail, almost as an afterthought, Shaun informed his parents
that he was getting promoted to sergeant and had received a Public Safety
Officer Medal of Valor. The award honors outstanding heroic deeds
performed above and beyond the call of duty.

"He said he would trade in all his medals just to come home," Rich
Cunningham said.

When life was different

Life was so simple, so carefree for the Cunninghams in 2001. Richard and
Kathleen were still basking in the glory of their youngest son, Chris, a
member of '99 Toms River East Little League team that made it to the United
States championship final in Williamsport, Pa.

Shannon, then 18, had secured a job as the hostess at the Olive Garden
restaurant in Toms River, and she was working with her brother Shaun, a
waiter. The two were inseparable. Shannon had struck up a friendship with
one of the cooks, Rob Rusiecki of Manchester, and Shaun had become
friends with another waiter, Tom Denning of Lacey's Lanoka Harbor section.

Two years later, the foursome remains linked. But now it is the Iraq war that
binds them together.

Sgt. Rob Rusiecki, Shannon's fiancee, is serving in Kuwait. Spc. Shaun
Cunningham is in Balad, a hotbed of activity, and Sgt. Tom Denning is at an
undisclosed area in the Persian Gulf.

"It's just so scary for me," Shannon said. "I know both Shaun and Rob are
targets. I read their letters and see the things they are going through, and I
get so frightened. The only thing that gets me through this is thinking about
when they all come home. How strong their friendship is going to be. How
special a bond they will have because of the war."

To relieve stress, Shannon has signed up for six summer-school courses,
three at Ocean County College, three at William Paterson University in
Wayne.

"I focus on school, my tests and my papers," Shannon said. "Anything to
divert my attention away from the war."

Letters home

While Shannon studies, her mother rereads letters from Shaun to ease the
pain, the longing. In a letter dated, April 18, Shaun wrote: "Welcome to
Baghdad, Iraq! I made it!!! The real exciting part was driving through all the
towns. The people were cheering and waving homemade American flags. I
gave this little Iraqi boy some water and candy and he gave me a hug and
said, 'No more Saddam.' He smiled and walked back to his mom."

"That letter really tugs at my heart," Kathleen Cunningham said. "It reminds
me that the Iraqi people are happy we did this for them. It tells me that Shaun
has a true sense of why we went over there."

Kathleen Cunningham said the letters always bring tears to her eyes --
especially the most recent one, dated May 9.

In it, Shaun wrote: "Mom, I'm telling you right now that if something should
happen to me, know that you and daddy are the best and I love my family a
lot. People are getting killed every day, and the look on their faces will stay
with me forever. I'm sure that you will hear about this (helicopter) crash
before this letter gets to you. Know that we acted honorably and the doctors
did everything they could to bring the men back to life. Say a prayer for them
and tell the church to also pray. Good soldiers, good men, now with God."

[Chris]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-scheer15jul15,1,7945990.column

A Firm Basis for Impeachment

By Robert Scheer
Los Angeles Times

Tuesday 15 July 2003

Does the president not read? Does his national security staff, led by
Condoleezza Rice, keep him in the dark about the most pressing issues of
the day? Or is this administration blatantly lying to the American people to
secure its ideological ends?

Those questions arise because of the White House admission that the
charge that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger was excised from a Bush
speech in October 2002 after the CIA and State Department insisted it was
unfounded. Bizarrely, however, three months later - without any additional
evidence emerging - that outrageous lie was inserted into the State of the
Union speech to justify the president's case for bypassing the United
Nations Security Council, for chasing U.N. inspectors out of Iraq and for
invading and occupying an oil-rich country.

This weekend, administration sources disclosed that CIA Director
George Tenet intervened in October to warn White House officials,
including deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley, not to use the
Niger information because it was based on a single source. That source
proved to be a forged document with glaring inconsistencies.

Bush's top security aides, led by Hadley's boss, Rice, went along with
the CIA, and Bush's October speech was edited to eliminate the false
charge that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium from Niger to create a
nuclear weapon.

We now know that before Bush's January speech, Robert G. Joseph,
the National Security Council individual who reports to Rice on nuclear
proliferation, was fully briefed by CIA analyst Alan Foley that the Niger
connection was no stronger than it had been in October. It is inconceivable
that in reviewing draft after draft of the State of the Union speech, NSC
staffers Hadley and Joseph failed to tell Rice that the president was about
to spread a big lie to justify going to war. On national security, the buck
doesn't stop with Tenet, the current fall guy. The buck stops with Bush and
his national security advisor, who is charged with funneling intelligence
data to the president. That included cluing in the president that the CIA's
concerns were backed by the State Department's conclusion that "the
claims of Iraqi pursuit of natural uranium in Africa are highly dubious."

For her part, Rice has tried to fend off controversy by claiming
ignorance. On "Meet the Press" in June, Rice claimed, "We did not know at
the time - no one knew at the time, in our circles - maybe someone knew
down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there
were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery." On Friday, Rice
admitted that she had known the State Department intelligence unit "was
the one that within the overall intelligence estimate had objected to that
sentence" and that Secretary of State Colin Powell had refused to use the
Niger document in his presentation to the U.N. because of what she
described as long-standing concerns about its credibility. But Rice also
knew the case for bypassing U.N. inspections and invading Iraq required
demonstrating an imminent threat. The terrifying charge that Iraq was
hellbent on developing nuclear weapons would do the trick nicely.

However, with the discrediting of the Niger buy and the equally dubious
citation of a purchase of aluminum tubes (which turned out to be
inappropriate for the production of enriched uranium), one can imagine the
disappointment at the White House. There was no evidence for painting
Saddam Hussein as a nuclear threat.

The proper reaction should have been to support the U.N. inspectors in
doing their work in an efficient and timely fashion. We now know, and
perhaps the White House knew then, that the inspectors eventually would
come up empty-handed because no weapons of mass destruction
program existed - not even a stray vial of chemical and biological weapons
has been discovered. However, that would have obviated the
administration's key rationale for an invasion, so lies substituted for facts
that didn't exist.

And there, dear readers, exists the firm basis for bringing a charge of
impeachment against the president who employed lies to lead us into war.

[Chris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/15/opinion/15KRUG.html

Pattern of Corruption

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Tuesday 15 July 2003

More than half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now bogged
down in Iraq, which didn't have significant weapons of mass
destruction and wasn't supporting Al Qaeda. We have lost all
credibility with allies who might have provided meaningful support;
Tony Blair is still with us, but has lost the trust of his public. All this
puts us in a very weak position for dealing with real threats. Did I
mention that North Korea has been extracting fissionable material
from its fuel rods?

How did we get into this mess? The case of the bogus uranium
purchases wasn't an isolated instance. It was part of a broad pattern
of politicized, corrupted intelligence.

Literally before the dust had settled, Bush administration officials
began trying to use 9/11 to justify an attack on Iraq. Gen. Wesley Clark
says that he received calls on Sept. 11 from "people around the White
House" urging him to link that assault to Saddam Hussein. His
account seems to back up a CBS.com report last September,
headlined "Plans for Iraq Attack Began on 9/11," which quoted notes
taken by aides to Donald Rumsfeld on the day of the attack: "Go
massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

But an honest intelligence assessment would have raised
questions about why we were going after a country that hadn't
attacked us. It would also have suggested the strong possibility that
an invasion of Iraq would hurt, not help, U.S. security.

So the Iraq hawks set out to corrupt the process of intelligence
assessment. On one side, nobody was held accountable for the
failure to predict or prevent 9/11; on the other side, top intelligence
officials were expected to support the case for an Iraq war.

The story of how the threat from Iraq's alleged W.M.D.'s was hyped
is now, finally, coming out. But let's not forget the persistent claim that
Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, which allowed the hawks to
pretend that the Iraq war had something to do with fighting terrorism.

As Greg Thielmann, a former State Department intelligence
official, said last week, U.S. intelligence analysts have consistently
agreed that Saddam did not have a "meaningful connection" to Al
Qaeda. Yet administration officials continually asserted such a
connection, even as they suppressed evidence showing real links
between Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia.

And during the run-up to war, George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, was
willing to provide cover for his bosses - just as he did last weekend.
In an October 2002 letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, he
made what looked like an assertion that there really were meaningful
connections between Saddam and Osama. Read closely, the letter is
evasive, but it served the administration's purpose.

What about the risk that an invasion of Iraq would weaken
America's security? Warnings from military experts that an extended
postwar occupation might severely strain U.S. forces have proved
precisely on the mark. But the hawks prevented any consideration of
this possibility. Before the war, one official told Newsweek that the
occupation might last no more than 30 to 60 days.

It gets worse. Knight Ridder newspapers report that a "small circle
of senior civilians in the Defense Department" were sure that their
favorite, Ahmad Chalabi, could easily be installed in power. They were
able to prevent skeptics from getting a hearing - and they had no
backup plan when efforts to anoint Mr. Chalabi, a millionaire
businessman, degenerated into farce.

So who will be held accountable? Mr. Tenet betrayed his office by
tailoring statements to reflect the interests of his political masters,
rather than the assessments of his staff - but that's not why he may
soon be fired. Yesterday USA Today reported that "some in the Bush
administration are arguing privately for a C.I.A. director who will be
unquestioningly loyal to the White House as committees demand
documents and call witnesses."

Not that the committees are likely to press very hard: Senator Pat
Roberts, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, seems
more concerned about protecting his party's leader than protecting
the country. "What concerns me most," he says, is "what appears to
be a campaign of press leaks by the C.I.A. in an effort to discredit the
president." In short, those who politicized intelligence in order to lead
us into war, at the expense of national security, hope to cover their
tracks by corrupting the system even further.

[Chris]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3063361.stm

Core of Weapons Case Crumbling
By Paul Reynolds
BBC News Online

Sunday 13 July 2003

Of the nine main conclusions in the British government document "Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction", not one has been shown to be conclusively
true.

The confusion evident about one of the claims, that Iraq sought uranium
from Niger despite having no civilian nuclear programme, is the latest
example of the process under which the allegations made so confidently last
September have been undermined.

The CIA has admitted that the claim should not have been in President
Bush's State of the Union speech.

The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently
sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa

President George W Bush in State of the Union address

It turns out that the CIA and the British intelligence agency MI6 passed
each other like ships in the night and did not share information.

Correspondents attending a Foreign Office briefing last week were
astounded when an official remarked that there had been no duty on Britain
to pass its information on Niger, which it obtained from "a foreign intelligence
service", to Washington as it was "up to the other intelligence service to do
so."

Apparently there is a protocol among intelligence services which could not
be broken despite the grave nature of the information and the use to which it
was put - in this case, to help justify going to war.

Even a CIA statement of explanation issued late last week was not quite
correct.

It said that the President's famous 16 words were accurate in that the
"British Government report said that Iraq sought uranium from Africa."

Mr Bush did not in fact simply mention a British "report" on the uranium.

He actually said that the British had "learned" that Iraq had sought these
supplies. He therefore hardened up the position.

Democratic Senator Carl Levin said on Sunday that this suggested intent
by the White House to exaggerate the threat from Iraq.

The nine main conclusions and the broad evidence which has emerged
about them are these:

1. "Iraq has a useable chemical and biological weapons capability which
has included recent production of chemical and biological agents."

No evidence of Iraq's useable capability has been found in terms of
manufacturing plants, bombs, rockets or actual chemical or biological
agents, nor any sign of recent production.

A mysterious truck has been found which the CIA says is a mobile
biological facility but this has not been accepted by all experts.

2. "Saddam continues to attach great importance to the possession of
weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles... He is determined to
retain these capabilities."

He may well have attached great importance to the possession of such
weapons but none has been found. The meaning of the word "capability" is
now key to this.

If the US and UK governments can show that Iraq maintained an active
expertise, amounting to a "programme", they will claim their case has been
made that Iraq violated UN resolutions.

3. "Iraq can deliver chemical and biological agents using an extensive
range of shells, bombs, sprayers and missiles."

Nothing major has been found so far. There was one aircraft adapted with
a sprayer but its capability was small.

4. "Iraq continues to work on developing nuclear weapons... Uranium has
been sought from Africa."

The UN watchdog the IAEA said there was no evidence for this up to the
start of the war and none has been found since. It is possible, though, that a
case could be made from a shopping list of items needed for such a
programme.

These include vacuum pumps, magnets, winding and balancing
machines - all listed in the British dossier. No details about these
purchasing attempts have been provided.

A claim that aluminium tubes were sought for this process was not wholly
accepted by the British assessment though it was by the American and has
subsequently not been proved.

The uranium claim is currently under question, though the British
Government stands by its allegation.

5. "Iraq possesses extended-range versions of the Scud ballistic missile."

No Scuds have been found. The British said Iraq might have up to 20, the
CIA said up to 12.

6. "Iraq's current military planning specifically envisages the use of
chemical and biological weapons."

That may have been the case but direct evidence from serving Iraqi
officers will be needed to prove it.

7. "The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons (chemical and
biological) within 45 minutes of a decision to do so."

The 45 minute claim is currently under question. It is said to come from "a
single source" probably a defector or Iraqi officer. It has not been proven.

8. "Iraq... is already taking steps to conceal and disperse sensitive
equipment."

This is a focus of the current American and British investigation being
carried out in Iraq by the Iraq Survey Group. One Iraqi scientist has come
forward to say that he hid blueprints of centrifuges under his roses but that
was in 1991.

If a pattern of concealment can be established, it would add to the
credibility of the allegations that Iraq wanted to defy the UN.

9. "Iraq's chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic missile programme
are well funded."

Evidence will be needed from serving Iraqi officials backed up by
documents. Again, if a pattern of funding can be established, a case against
Iraq could be made but if the actual programmes did not exist, was the
funding of much use and in any case, how much was it?

President Bush and Prime Minister Blair will be meeting in Washington
later this week when they will discuss their strategy to justify the claims.

[Chris]

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/100436p-90699c.html

Bush Could be a One-Termer

By Michael Kramer
The New York Daily News

Sunday 13 July 2003

President Bush could lose the 2004 election. Before now, I didn't think
that was possible. Considering Bush's general popularity, political skills
that dwarf his father's and the prospective Democratic alternatives, I
thought Bush would win reelection - and probably easily.

What's changed? The prospect for a major scandal involving the
administration's arguments for going to war against Iraq and,
specifically, the President's cavalier, even arrogant, responses to the
charge that he and his aides distorted or exaggerated the intelligence on
which the case for battle rested.

This story, only now unfolding, is getting uglier every day.

Right now, the focus is on Bush's assertion, made in his Jan. 28 State
of the Union address, that deposed dictator Saddam Hussein had tried
to develop a nuclear weapons program by buying uranium in Africa.

The intel on which that claim was based, relying as it did on forged
documents, has now been shot down.

The key question is this: Did the administration know the intelligence
was bogus when the President used it to help justify toppling Saddam?

Over the past week, the White House position has shifted. At first, the
Bushies pointed to the careful way in which the President had said it was
the British who had uncovered the uranium evidence.

Then, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said, "The CIA
cleared the [State of the Union] speech in its entirety."

In that broadside, Rice went further, saying that if CIA head George
Tenet had said, "'Take this out of the speech,' it would have been gone."

Next, on Friday, the President echoed Rice: In Uganda, Bush said, "I
gave a speech to the nation that was cleared by the intelligence
services."

Hours later, Tenet fell on his sword. In a written statement, the CIA chief
confirmed the President's account and said the 16-word sentence in
Bush's speech should "never" have been included, a mistake for which
he took responsibility as the agency's director.

One other piece of the drama deserves noting. A few days after Bush's
State of the Union address, Secretary of State Powell made the case for
war at the UN and pointedly refused to repeat the uranium charge - a
reluctance apparently based on the fact that State's own spooks had told
him the assertion couldn't be supported.

As the flap unfolded a few days ago, Powell told CNN's Larry King that
while he wasn't sure how the uranium allegation made it into Bush's
address, it was "not a deliberate attempt by the President to mislead or
exaggerate." That claim, Powell added, "is just ridiculous."

The White House believes Tenet's mea culpa will put the controversy to
rest, but there's something else about Bush's handling of this mess that
leads me to conclude the President's reelection could be in jeopardy.

A day before saying the "intelligence services" had "cleared" his State of
the Union speech, Bush told reporters, "One thing is certain: [Saddam
Hussein] is not trying to buy anything right now."

Leaving aside the administration's new admission that Saddam's still
alive - and therefore the chance that he might be trying to buy something
right now - the President's comment was an arrogant dismissal of those
who think this is a big deal, which it is.

Arrogance is something voters don't like. We want our leaders to be
confident - and to project confidence. We'll even accept the macho
jingoism in which this particular President often couches his confidence.

But the line between confidence and arrogance is thin, and when it's
crossed, all bets are off.

Recall that the first President Bush lost in 1992 because he seemed to
arrogantly dismiss the concerns many voters felt about the economy.
"Message: I care," Bush 41's infamous attempt to connect with voter
anxiety, was taken by many as proof that their patrician President didn't
even understand their pain, let alone feel it.

Bush 43 is a looser guy and a smarter pol than his dad, and in dealing
with today's economic troubles, he has not - or at least not yet- made the
same mistake.

But Bush's off-the-cuff comment about Saddam is a mistake in the
same zone of arrogance. If he keeps it up, it could cost him dearly. No
matter how Tenet and other administration figures move to protect the
President, the Democrats are sure to highlight the flap during the 2004
campaign.

Clinton factor

Now the difference between '92 and 2004 can be summed up in a
name: Bill Clinton. In other words, this Bush won't lose unless the
Democrats run a similarly charismatic candidate capable of appealing to
the vast center that determines presidential elections.

So far, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean is exuding the most energy
on the Democratic side, yet he is the most left-leaning of the major
wanna-bes. In the end, it's hard to see Dean beating Bush, although it
isn't hard to see him capturing the Democratic nomination.

But it's still early in the '04 cycle, other Democrats could emerge and
Bush suddenly seems tone deaf to the trouble he's causing himself. We
could have a race after all.

[Chris]

http://www.sundayherald.com/35264

Niger and Iraq: the War's Biggest Lie?

By Neal Mackay
The Sunday Herald (UK)

Sunday 13 July 2003

Investigation: Neil Mackay reveals why everyone now
accepts that claims Saddam Hussein got uranium from
Africa are fraudulent ... except, that is, Britain's
beleaguered prime minister and his Cabinet supporters

In February 1999, Wissam Al Zahawie, the Iraqi ambassador to the Holy
See in Rome, set off on a series of diplomatic visits to several African
countries, including Niger. This trip triggered the allegations that Iraq was
trying to buy tons of uranium from Niger -- a claim which could yet prove
the most damning evidence that the British government exaggerated
intelligence to bolster its case for war on Iraq .

Some time after the Iraqi ambassador's trip to Niger, the Italian
intelligence service came into possession of forged documents claiming
Saddam was after Niger uranium. We now know these documents were
passed to MI6 and then handed by the British to the office of US
Vice-President Dick Cheney . The forgeries were then used by Bush and
Blair to scare the British and Americans and to box both Congress and
Parliament into supporting war. There are an increasing number of claims
suggesting Bush and Blair knew these documents were forged when they
used them as evidence that Saddam Hussein was putting together a
nuclear arsenal.

The truth behind claims that Blair's government 'sexed up' intelligence
reports that Saddam could mobilise weapons of mass destruction in 45
minutes may never be known, but the Niger forgeries lie like a smoking
gun covered in Britain's fingerprints. At some point Tony Blair is going to
have to answer questions about what the British government and MI6 were
up to.

The fact that the documents were forged matters less than the purpose to
which they were put. On September 24, 2002, Blair's dossier Iraq's
Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government
said: 'There is intelligence that Iraq has sought the supply of significant
quantities of uranium from Africa. Iraq has no active civil nuclear power
programme of nuclear power plants and, therefore, has no legitimate
reason to acquire uranium.'

On January 28, 2003, Bush, in his State of the Union address, said: 'The
British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa.' Bush didn't stop there -- later,
there was talk of 'mushroom clouds' unless Saddam was taken out.

It was the International Atomic Energy Agency which rumbled the
documents as forgeries -- a task that their experts were able to complete
in just a matter of hours. Here are just four examples of how easy it was to
work out the documents were, as one intelligence source said, 'total
bull****':

In a letter from the President of Niger a reference is made to the
constitution of May 12, 1965 -- but the constitution is dated August 9, 1999;

Another letter purports to be signed by Niger's foreign minister, but bears
the signature of Allele Elhadj Habibou, the minister between 1988-89;

An obsolete letterhead is used, including the wrong symbol for the
presidency, and references to state bodies such as the Supreme Military
Council and the Council for National Reconciliation are incompatible with
the letter's date;

It wasn't until just before the war began that Mohamed El Baradei, IAEA
director-general, told the UN Security Council on March 7 that his team and
'outside experts', had worked out that ' these documents ... are in fact not
authentic'.

Exactly who was behind the forgeries is unclear but the finger of
suspicion points towards some disaffected or bribed official in Niger .
What looks more certain is that Bush and Blair were warned the
documents were rubbish before El Baradei told the UN. The IAEA says it
sought evidence about the Niger connection from Britain and America
immediately after the US issued a state department factsheet on
December 19, 2002, headed 'Illustrative Examples of Omissions from the
Iraqi Declaration to the United Nations Security Council'. In it, under the
heading 'Nuclear Weapons', it reads: 'The declaration ignores efforts to
procure uranium from Niger. Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium
procurement?' But the IAEA, despite repeatedly begging the UK and US for
access to papers, wasn't given any documents until February 2003 -- six
weeks later.

Well before the IAEA rained on the pro-war parade, the CIA was telling its
masters in the Bush administration that the British intelligence on the
Niger connection was nonsense. Vice-President Dick Cheney's office
received the forged evidence in 2002 -- before Bush's State of the Union
address on January 28 this year -- and passed it to the CIA. The CIA then
dispatched former US ambassador Joseph C Wilson to Africa to check out
the claim. Wilson came back saying the intelligence was unreliable and
the CIA passed Cheney the assessment. Nevertheless, Bush kept the
claim in his speech, and Cheney said, just days before the war began in
March, that: 'We know (Saddam's) been absolutely trying to acquire
nuclear weapons, and we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear
weapons.' He also poured scorn on the IAEA for saying the documents
were forged. 'I think Mr El Baradei frankly is wrong ... (The IAEA) has
consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was
doing. I don't have any reason to be lieve they're any more valid this time
than they've been in the past.'

Wilson said it was Cheney who forced the CIA to try to come up with a
credible threat from Iraqi nukes. 'I have little choice but to conclude that
some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons programme
was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat. A legitimate argument can be
made that we went to war under false pretences,' he wrote. Wilson also
said: 'It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts
on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war. It begs
the question: 'What else are they lying about?''

Wilson is no rogue official. He was lauded by George Bush Snr for
'fighting the good fight' after he became the last US diplomat to confront
Saddam in the run-up to the first Gulf war. The irony isn't lost on Wilson,
who says: 'I guess he didn't realise that one of these days I would carry
that fight against his son's administration.'

Greg Thielmann, director of the State Department's Office of Strategic,
Proliferation and Military Issues, says the State Department's Bureau of
Intelligence and Research ruled the Niger connection implausible and told
US Secretary of State Colin Powell. Thielmann also said Iraq posed no
nuclear threat, and Team Bush distorted intelligence to fit its drive for war.
Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director now leading a review of the
agency's pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMDs, says intelligence was
ambiguous and the CIA was under pressure from the Bush
administration.

The CIA, in what one British intelligence source described as a 'wise
attempt at an ass-saving manoeuvre', also tried to have reference to Iraq's
uranium links to Niger deleted from Bush's State of the Union address.
CIA officials say they 'communicated significant doubts to the
administration about the evidence'. Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national
security adviser, disputes the claim, saying the CIA cleared the reference
made by Bush.

The CIA also tried to save Blair's ass too. In September, before
publication of the UK dossier citing the Niger connection, the CIA tried to
persuade Britain not to use the claim. CIA figures say the agency was
consulted by the UK and 'recommended against using that material'. Blair,
however, continues to defend the allegation, claiming the UK has separate
intelligence -- or 'non-documentary evidence' -- to back up the Niger claim,
proving Britain wasn't solely reliant on the forgeries. That's quite a different
tack to the White House, which shamefacedly admitted on Monday that
Bush's uranium claim was based on faulty British intelligence and
shouldn't have been included in the State of the Union address. But Bush
is determined not to find himself in the same situation as Blair -- facing
calls for his resignation over claims that he lied. On Friday, CIA director
George Tenet said he was to blame for Bush's use of the bogus uranium
claim . He said the insertion was a 'mistake', the CIA cleared the speech
and ' the President had every reason to believe the text presented to him
was sound'. But that doesn't tally with high-level intelligence that the Niger
claim was written into the President's Daily Brief -- one of the most
top-level intelligence assessments in the US, prepared by the CIA and
given to Bush and other very senior officials.

Also significant was the refusal by Colin Powell to use the uranium claim
when he addressed the UN on February 5 calling for war. On Thursday,
Powell said it was not 'sufficiently reliable'. With Bush trying to get off the
hook, Blair looks as if he could be twisting in the wind -- unless he has
this 'other evidence' to back up the Niger connection. It should be pointed
out that it would be extremely difficult for Niger to sell uranium in quantities
large enough to be weaponised as its mines are controlled by France and
its entire output goes to France, Japan and Spain. E xperts say it couldn't
be smuggled out unnoticed. One western diplomat said: 'As far as I know,
the only other evidence Britain has about the Niger connection is based on
intelligence coming from other western countries which saw the same
forgeries. Blair's claim that he has other evidence is nonsense. These
foreign intelligence agencies are basing their claims on the same
forgeries as the Brits.'

The diplomat's accusations tally with a letter sent in April, before the
White House climbdown, by the State Department to Democrat House of
Representative's member Henry Waxman, who has been demanding
answers on the deception carried out against the American and British
people. In it, the State Department admits that it received intelligence from
the UK and another 'western European ally' -- which many believe to be
Italy -- that Iraq was trying to buy Niger uranium. But it adds: 'not until March
4 did we learn that, in fact, the second western European government had
based its assessment on the evidence already available to the US that
was subsequently discredited'. In other words, as one intelligence source
said: 'It was based on the same crap the British used'. Given the letter is
dated April 29, this information invites the question: why did it take until last
week for the White House to admit the Niger connection was rubbish?

Another State Department letter to Waxman makes the astonishing
admission that when America handed the Niger documents to the IAEA
they included the qualification 'we cannot confirm these reports and have
questions regarding some specific claims' -- hardly the same tune that
Bush and Blair were singing with their claims that Saddam was chasing
down Niger uranium.

We know that Blair's 'other' evidence backing the Niger connection
includes second-hand or even third-hand intelligence -- and that it doesn't
come from the UK. Nor has this intelligence been passed to the IAEA (in
accordance with UN resolution 1414). The Foreign Office says: 'In the case
of uranium from Niger, we did not have any UK-originated intelligence to
pass on.'

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw says the Niger uranium claim was based
on 'reliable evidence', which was not shared with the US. Although the
Foreign Affairs Select Committee hasn't seen the evidence either, Straw
told its chairman, Donald Anderson, the 'good reasons' for withholding the
intelligence from the US in a private session. Blair won't say why the
information is being kept under wraps , but he tells the nation there is no
reason to doubt its credibility.

Foreign Office minister Mike O'Brien said on June 10 that all relevant
information on Iraqi WMDs had been sent to weapons inspectors -- but
less than a month later he was contradicted by another Foreign Office
minister, Denis MacShane, saying the UK didn't give the IAEA any
information on Iraq seeking uranium. One senior western diplomat told
the Sunday Herald: 'There were more than 20 anomalies in the Niger
documents -- it is staggering any intelligence service could have believed
they were genuine for a moment.

'I know that the IAEA told Britain and America, two weeks before El
Baradei made his statement to the UN in March, that the documents were
forgeries, that the IAEA was going to publicly state the documents were
faked. At that point, the IAEA gave them a chance -- they asked the US and
UK if they had any other evidence to back up the claim apart from the Niger
forgeries. Britain and America should have reacted with shock and horror
when they found that the documents were fake -- but they did nothing, and
there was no attempt to dissuade the IAEA from its course of action.

'The IAEA had said it would follow up any other evidence pointing towards
a Niger connection . If the UK and US had had such evidence they could
have forwarded it and shut the IAEA up -- El Baradei would never have
gone public if that had happened. My analysis is that Britain has no other
credible evidence.' The source added: 'The weapons inspectors have
friends in the CIA and the State Department . They made sure the
documents made their way to the IAEA as they knew fine well they'd be
exposed as forgeries.

'If I was prosecuting someone in a court of law and I brought in what I
knew to be forgeries in an attempt to convict you, the case would be thrown
out immediately and it'd be me in the dock. The case wasn't thrown out
against Iraq, however, and what we are left with is an ominous sense of
the way intelligence was treated to promote war. There are only two
conclusions: one is that Britain has intelligence but kept it from the
weapons inspectors, which they should not have done under international
law, or that they don't have a thing. If they did have intelligence, then why
not show it to the world now the war is over'.

An IAEA source said the issue was 'now a matter for the UK and the USA
to deal with'. The IAEA, as well as UNMOVIC inspectors, feel discredited
and humiliated after their bruising encounters with the UK and US. One
UN diplomat said: 'They're bitter, but perhaps now they may have some
solace as the truth seems to be coming out. It's obvious that we could
have done this without a war -- but the evidence shows war would have
happened regardless of what the inspectors could have done as that was
the wish of Bush and Blair. Everyone, it seems, was working for peace --
except them.'

[Chris]

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0714-01.htm

Intelligence Unglued

by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Monday 14 July 2003

MEMORANDUM FOR: The President of the United States
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: Intelligence Unglued

The glue that holds the Intelligence Community together is melting
under the hot lights of an awakened press. If you do not act quickly, your
intelligence capability will fall apart-with grave consequences for the
nation.

The Forgery Flap
By now you are all too familiar with the play-by-play. The
Iraq-seeking-uranium-in-Niger forgery is a microcosm of a mischievous
nexus of overarching problems. Instead of addressing these problems,
your senior staff are alternately covering up for one another and gently
stabbing one another in the back. CIA Director George Tenet's extracted,
unapologetic apology on July 11 was classic-I confess; she did it.

It is now dawning on our until-now somnolent press that your
national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, shepherds the foreign
affairs sections of your state-of-the-union address and that she, not
Tenet, is responsible for the forged information getting into the speech.
But the disingenuousness persists. Surely Dr. Rice cannot persist in her
insistence that she learned only on June 8, 2003 about former
ambassador Joseph Wilson's mission to Niger in February 2002, when
he determined that the Iraq-Niger report was a con-job. Wilson's findings
were duly reported to all concerned in early March 2002. And, if she
somehow missed that report, the New York Times' Nicholas Kristoff on
May 6 recounted chapter and verse on Wilson's mission, and the story
remained the talk of the town in the weeks that followed.

Rice's denials are reminiscent of her claim in spring 2002 that there
was no reporting suggesting that terrorists were planning to hijack
planes and slam them into buildings. In September, the joint
congressional committee on 9/11 came up with a dozen such reports.

Secretary of State Colin Powell's credibility, too, has taken serious
hits as continued non-discoveries of weapons in Iraq heap doubt on his
confident assertions to the UN. Although he was undoubtedly trying to be
helpful in trying to contain the Iraq-Niger forgery affair, his recent
description of your state-of-the-union words as "not totally outrageous"
was faint praise indeed. And his explanations as to why he made a point
to avoid using the forgery in the way you did was equally unhelpful.

Whatever Rice's or Powell's credibility, it is yours that matters. And, in
our view, the credibility of the intelligence community is an inseparably
close second. Attempts to dismiss or cover up the cynical use to which
the known forgery was put have been-well, incredible. The British have a
word for it: "dodgy." You need to put a quick end to the dodginess, if the
country is to have a functioning intelligence community.

The Vice President's Role
Attempts at cover up could easily be seen as comical, were the issue
not so serious. Highly revealing were Ari Fleisher's remarks early last
week, which set the tone for what followed. When asked about the
forgery, he noted tellingly-as if drawing on well memorized talking
points-that the Vice President was not guilty of anything. The
disingenuousness was capped on Friday, when George Tenet did his
awkward best to absolve the Vice President from responsibility.

To those of us who experienced Watergate these comments had an
eerie ring. That affair and others since have proven that cover-up can
assume proportions overshadowing the crime itself. All the more reason
to take early action to get the truth up and out.

There is just too much evidence that Ambassador Wilson was sent to
Niger at the behest of Vice President Cheney's office, and that Wilson's
findings were duly reported not only to that office but to others as well.
Equally important, it was Cheney who launched (in a major speech on
August 26, 2002) the concerted campaign to persuade Congress and
the American people that Saddam Hussein was about to get his hands
on nuclear weapons-a campaign that mushroomed, literally, in early
October with you and your senior advisers raising the specter of a
"mushroom cloud" being the first "smoking gun" we might observe.

That this campaign was based largely on information known to be
forged and that the campaign was used successfully to frighten our
elected representatives in Congress into voting for war is clear from the
bitter protestations of Rep. Henry Waxman and others. The politically
aware recognize that the same information was used, also successfully,
in the campaign leading up to the mid-term elections-a reality that
breeds a cynicism highly corrosive to our political process.

The fact that the forgery also crept into your state-of-the-union
address pales in significance in comparison with how it was used to
deceive Congress into voting on October 11 to authorize you to make war
on Iraq.

It was a deep insult to the integrity of the intelligence process that,
after the Vice President declared on August 26, 2002 that "we know that
Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," the
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) produced during the critical month
of September featured a fraudulent conclusion that "most analysts"
agreed with Cheney's assertion. This may help explain the anomaly of
Cheney's unprecedented "multiple visits" to CIA headquarters at the
time, as well as the many reports that CIA and other intelligence analysts
were feeling extraordinarily great pressure, accompanied by all manner
of intimidation tactics, to concur in that conclusion. As a coda to his
nuclear argument, Cheney told NBC's Meet the Press three days before
US/UK forces invaded Iraq: "we believe he (Saddam Hussein) has
reconstituted nuclear weapons."

Mr. Russert: ...the International Atomic Energy Agency said
he does not have a nuclear program; we disagree?

Vice President Cheney: I disagree, yes. And you'll find the
CIA, for example, and other key parts of the intelligence
community disagree...we know he has been absolutely
devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we
believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I
think Mr. ElBaradei (Director of the IAEA) frankly is wrong.

Contrary to what Cheney and the NIE said, the most knowledgeable
analysts-those who know Iraq and nuclear weapons-judged that the
evidence did not support that conclusion. They now have been proven
right.

Adding insult to injury, those chairing the NIE succumbed to the
pressure to adduce the known forgery as evidence to support the
Cheney line, and relegated the strong dissent of the State Department's
Bureau of Intelligence and Research (and the nuclear engineers in the
Department of Energy) to an inconspicuous footnote.

It is a curious turn of events. The drafters of the offending sentence
on the forgery in president's state-of-the-union speech say they were
working from the NIE. In ordinary circumstances an NIE would be the
preeminently authoritative source to rely upon; but in this case the NIE
itself had already been cooked to the recipe of high policy.

Joseph Wilson, the former US ambassador who visited Niger at
Cheney's request, enjoys wide respect (including, like several VIPS
members, warm encomia from your father). He is the consummate
diplomat. So highly disturbed is he, however, at the chicanery he has
witnessed that he allowed himself a very undiplomatic comment to a
reporter last week, wondering aloud "what else they are lying about."
Clearly, Wilson has concluded that the time for diplomatic language has
passed. It is clear that lies were told. Sad to say, it is equally clear that
your vice president led this campaign of deceit.

This was no case of petty corruption of the kind that forced Vice
President Spiro Agnew's resignation. This was a matter of war and
peace. Thousands have died. There is no end in sight.

Recommendation #1
We recommend that you call an abrupt halt to attempts to prove Vice
President Cheney "not guilty." His role has been so transparent that
such attempts will only erode further your own credibility. Equally
pernicious, from our perspective, is the likelihood that intelligence
analysts will conclude that the way to success is to acquiesce in the
cooking of their judgments, since those above them will not be held
accountable. We strongly recommend that you ask for Cheney's
immediate resignation. The Games Congress Plays

The unedifying dance by the various oversight committees of the
Congress over recent weeks offers proof, if further proof were needed,
that reliance on Congress to investigate in a non-partisan way is pie in
the sky. One need only to recall that Sen. Pat Roberts, Chair of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, has refused to agree to ask the FBI to
investigate the known forgery. Despite repeated attempts by others on
his committee to get him to bring in the FBI, Roberts has branded such a
move "inappropriate," without spelling out why.

Rep. Porter Goss, head of the House Intelligence Committee, is a
CIA alumnus and a passionate Republican and agency partisan. Goss
was largely responsible for the failure of the joint congressional
committee on 9/11, which he co-chaired last year. An unusually clear
indication of where Goss' loyalties lie can be seen in his admission that
after a leak to the press last spring he bowed to Cheney's insistence that
the FBI be sent to the Hill to investigate members and staff of the joint
committee-an unprecedented move reflecting blithe disregard for the
separation of powers and a blatant attempt at intimidation. (Congress
has its own capability to investigate such leaks.)

Henry Waxman's recent proposal to create yet another congressional
investigatory committee, patterned on the latest commission looking into
9/11, likewise holds little promise. To state the obvious about Congress,
politics is the nature of the beast. We have seen enough congressional
inquiries into the performance of intelligence to conclude that they are
usually as feckless as they are prolonged. And time cannot wait. As you
are aware, Gen. Brent Scowcroft performed yeoman's service as
National Security Adviser to your father and enjoys very wide respect.
There are few, if any, with his breadth of experience with the issues and
the institutions involved. In addition, he has avoided blind parroting of the
positions of your administration and thus would be seen as relatively
nonpartisan, even though serving at your pleasure. It seems a stroke of
good luck that he now chairs your President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board

Recommendation #2
We repeat, with an additional sense of urgency, the recommendation
in our last memorandum to you (May 1) that you appoint Gen. Brent
Scowcroft, Chair of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board to
head up an independent investigation into the use/abuse of intelligence
on Iraq. UN Inspectors

Your refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq has left the
international community befuddled. Worse, it has fed suspicions that the
US does not want UN inspectors in country lest they impede efforts to
"plant" some "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, should efforts to
find them continue to fall short. The conventional wisdom is less
conspiratorial but equally unsatisfying. The cognoscenti in Washington
think tanks, for example, attribute your attitude to "pique." We find neither
the conspiracy nor the "pique" rationale persuasive. As we have admitted
before, we are at a loss to explain the barring of UN inspectors. Barring
the very people with the international mandate, the unique experience,
and the credibility to undertake a serious search for such weapons
defies logic. UN inspectors know Iraq, know the weaponry in question,
know the Iraqi scientists/engineers who have been involved, know how
the necessary materials are procured and processed; in short, have
precisely the expertise required. The challenge is as daunting as it is
immediate; and, clearly, the US needs all the help it can get. The lead
Wall Street Journal article of April 8 had it right: "If the US doesn't make
any undisputed discoveries of forbidden weapons, the failure will feed
already-widespread skepticism abroad about the motives for going to
war." As the events of last week show, that skepticism has now
mushroomed here at home as well.

Recommendation #3
We recommend that you immediately invite the UN inspectors back
into Iraq. This would go a long way toward refurbishing your credibility.
Equally important, it would help sort out the lessons learned for the
intelligence community and be an invaluable help to an investigation of
the kind we have suggested you direct Gen. Scowcroft to lead.

If Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity can be of any further
help to you in the days ahead, you need only ask.

Ray Close, Princeton, NJ
David MacMichael, Linden, VA
Raymond McGovern, Arlington, VA
Steering Committee
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

[Chris]

http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/redir.php?jid=82ef9d7ba603481d

Blix Slams UK Iraq WMD Claim
CNN

Sunday 13 July 2003

LONDON, England -- Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said it
was "highly unlikely" that Saddam Hussein could have deployed weapons of
mass destruction in 45 minutes.

Blix told the Independent on Sunday newspaper that the claim, made in the
British government's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons program,
was a "fundamental mistake."

"I don't know exactly how they calculated this figure of 45 minutes in the
dossier of September last year. That seems pretty far off the mark to me," Blix
said.

"I think that was a fundamental mistake.

"It seems to me highly unlikely that there were any means of delivering
biological or chemical weapons within 45 minutes."

Asked if British Prime Minister Tony Blair had relied on flawed intelligence or
misinterpreted it, he said: "They over-interpreted the intelligence they had."

Blix said he had talked to Blair several times and that the prime minister
was "strongly convinced" of the the existence of weapons of mass
destruction.

"In fact, I was the one who was skeptical and critical, and said that I didn't
think that the evidence was so strong, and said so to the Security Council,"
Blix said.

Britain's September dossier on Iraq also has come under fire for its claim
that Saddam tried to buy uranium from an African nation.

U.S. President George W. Bush included that claim in his January State of
the Union address, but the White House now says the allegation was
unsubstantiated.

CIA Director George Tenet has since taken responsiblity for allowing Bush
to include the claim in his speech.

However, UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has defended Britain's decision
to include the claim in its September dossier.

Straw acknowledged Saturday the CIA expressed reservations about the
claim, but he insisted it was based on what British officials regarded as
"reliable intelligence" that had not been shared with Washington.

[Chris]

http://www.berkshireeagle.com/Stories/0,1413,101%257E6267%257E1506312,00.html

Why does 9/11 Inquiry Scare Bush?

July 11, 2003
Berkshire Eagle (Massachusetts) | Editorial

The Bush administration has never wanted an inquiry into the intelligence
and law-enforcement failures that led up to the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001, and it is doing its best to make sure we never get one. Even the
tame commission of Washington insiders, led by men of the president's own
party, is now complaining that its work is being hampered by foot-dragging
from the Pentagon and Justice Department in producing documents and
witnesses, in an effort to run the clock out on it before it can complete its
work.

The commission's leaders have taken the extraordinary step of accusing
the White House of witness "intimidation," insisting that sensitive witnesses
testify only in the presence of a "monitor" from their agency. The parallel to
Saddam Hussein's refusal to let Iraqi scientists talk to U.N. weapons
inspectors without a similar monitor is too glaring to miss and begs the
obvious question: What has Mr. Bush got to hide?

The crudeness of his tactics suggests that whatever it is, it must be pretty
bad. The Internet is full of wild theories -- that Mr. Bush knew in advance of
9/11 and allowed it to happen so he could exploit it to get his way in domestic
and international politics is the most notable -- and while cyberspace is the
natural home of the improbable and the far-fetched, the administration's
stonewalling only lends credence to those who believe a cover-up of
something is going on.

September 11 was the most traumatic incident in recent American history.
Three thousand people died in New York, billions in property was destroyed,
the national economy tanked and Americans' sense of security was
shattered. The men responsible for the attacks are still at large and openly
threaten to attack us again. Yet the commission's budget is only $3 million, a
pittance compared to the $100 million that was wasted getting to the bottom
of Bill Clinton's Whitewater investment and his extramarital affairs. The
hearings in the Republican-dominated Congress were a perfunctory affair
that attracted even less attention from a sensation-oriented media than is
being paid to this commission.

The American people deserve a thorough investigation. They want to know
why the fighter jets weren't scrambled after the first plane hit the tower, what
the Clinton and Bush administrations knew about threats from al-Qaida and
what they were doing about them, what citizens of our allies Saudi Arabia and
Pakistan financed Osama bin Laden and his hijackers, how the FBI and CIA
missed obvious clues and let suspects they were following slip away, why
airline security was so lax, what is the meaning of a suspicious pattern of
stock transactions that occurred before the attacks, whether law enforcement
efforts were subordinated to diplomatic priorities and the needs and desires
of American oil companies.

Americans want the answers to two basic questions: What went wrong?
And what is being done to make sure it never happens again? They should
be satisfied with nothing less than an honest effort to get those answers, no
matter who they embarrass, and the White House should not stand in the
way.

[Chris]

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGAP9RMP8ID.html

Tenet Says White House Official Insisted Questionable Information Be
Included in Speech, Democrat Says

By Ken Guggenheim
The Associated Press

Thursday 17 July 2003

WASHINGTON - CIA Director George Tenet told members of Congress a
White House official insisted that President Bush's State of the Union
address include an assertion about Saddam Hussein's nuclear intentions
that had not been verified, a Senate Intelligence Committee member said
Thursday.

Sen. Dick Durbin, who was present for a 4 1/2-hour appearance by Tenet
behind closed doors with Intelligence Committee members Wednesday,
said Tenet named the official. But the Illinois Democrat said that person's
identity could not be revealed because of the confidentiality of the
proceedings.

"He (Tenet) certainly told us who the person was who was insistent on
putting this language in which the CIA knew to be incredible, this language
about the uranium shipment from Africa," Durbin said on ABC's "Good
Morning America."

"And there was this negotiation between the White House and the CIA
about just how far you could go and be close to the truth and unfortunately
those sixteen words were included in the most important speech the
president delivers in any given year," Durbin added.

Tenet - described as "very contrite" - told the Senate panel he was
responsible for bad intelligence finding its way into Bush's Jan. 28 speech
to Congress and the nation. In that address, the president cited the
accusation about an African connection as part of his justification for going
to war to oust Saddam.

"The more important question is who is it in the White House who was
hellbent on misleading the American people and why are they still there?,"
Durbin said Thursday.

"Being a member of the Intelligence Committee I can't disclose that but I
trust that it will come out," he said. "But it should come out from the
president. The president should be outraged that he was misled and that
he then misled the American people."

Durbin and other Democrats in the Senate had said earlier the question
is not why Tenet failed to remove the Africa information from the speech,
but who insisted on leaving it in. "All roads still lead back to 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue," Durbin said.

He promised to offer an amendment later Thursday to a pending defense
spending bill "calling on the president to report to Congress as to exactly
how intelligence was used by his White House. Was he given good
information, or people in his White House given good information, which
was then hyped or spun or exaggerated to try to create this sentiment in
favor of war. That's a very important question."

The claim that Saddam sought uranium from Africa was supported by
British intelligence but rejected by U.S. officials. It was based, at least in
part, on a series of forged documents.

Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, blamed Tenet
for failing to seek the removal of the statement from the January speech.
Tenet issued a statement Friday accepting responsibility.

After Wednesday's hearing, Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat
Roberts, R-Kan., described Tenet as "very contrite. He was very candid,
very forthcoming. He accepted full responsibility."

Roberts said it was clear "there were mistakes made up and down the
chain." He said the hearing reaffirmed his belief that "the handling of this
was sloppy."

Roberts also said he expected to hold open hearings on the Iraq
intelligence, probably in September.

But Democratic committee members said too much blame was being
placed on Tenet.

"In a sense, I feel a little badly for George Tenet," said Sen. Ron Wyden,
D-Ore.

Wyden said the CIA was not pushing to have the uranium matter included
in Bush's speech, but that the White House was trying to justify its drive to
oust Saddam.

"I believe that there was if not a battle royal between the CIA staff and the
White House staff, certainly some back and forth," he said. "I believe that in
this case, the White House political staff was looking at every rock, every
nook and cranny to make their case and I believe the political staff
prevailed."

Responding to a question, Roberts said White House officials may be
called before the panel to discuss the handling of the intelligence.

Both the Senate and House intelligence committees are holding
inquiries on whether prewar intelligence was inaccurate or mishandled to
help Bush make the case for war. Democrats have stepped up demands
for a formal investigation after the White House acknowledged that the
uranium claim should not have been in the State of the Union speech.

A proposal by Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., for an independent investigation
of the prewar intelligence was defeated Wednesday in the Senate on a
51-45 vote. Corzine sought to include the amendment as part of a $386.6
billion defense spending bill.

Senate Appropriations Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, described the
proposal as "an attempt to smear the president of the United States."

[Chris]

http://TomPaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8270

Hawks Say The Damnedest Things!

by Mark Engler; July 17, 2003


Keeping track of the "real reason" for the invasion of Iraq can be
quite a chore these days. The Bush administration doggedly
maintains that its claims about weapons of mass destruction
were legitimate. Yet a litany of apologists has scrambled for
other explanations. As it became evident that Saddam's deadly
arsenal was unlikely to ever materialize, these defenders have
argued that the invasion of Iraq wasn't about the danger of
Saddam's imminent attack after all.

This political damage control can make for fascinating reading
because, in proposing their alternative rationales, the hawks are
not only revealing a lot about the warped ideology of unilateral
military adventurism -- they are making remarkable admissions
about why there should be a public investigation into the
president's lies.

"WMD was never the basic reason for war. Nor was it the horrid
repression in Iraq. Or the danger Saddam posed to his
neighbors," writes Daniel Pipes, a conservative columnist for The
New York Post. All this should come as a surprise to the
American people, who were called upon to invest confidence in
each of these ideas. But having ruled out such leading
justifications, Pipes goes on to explain that "The campaign in
Iraq is about keeping promises to the United States or paying
the consequences."

His point is that, since Saddam Hussein had played
cat-and-mouse with weapons inspectors for years, the United
States had a right to take him out. Who cares whether he
actually had any arsenal? The defiance alone set a precedent
that was incompatible with the neoconservative project of
projecting U.S. dominance.

"Keep your promises or you are gone. It's a powerful precedent
that U.S. leaders should make the most of," says Pipes.

While this position may be an important premise for an imperial
foreign policy, it's not diplomatically tenable for the White House
to argue it openly. Nor is it clear that the American people would
have been willing to put soldiers' lives on the line if the
administration forthrightly admitted that there was no real danger
in Iraq, only a petty thug who threatened our ability to look
tough.

Thomas Friedman at The New York Times is more moderate
than Pipes, but no less adamant a defender of the Iraq War. He,
too, argues that the "real reason" for the invasion was America's
need to send a message to "the Arab-Muslim world."

"Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine,"
Friedman writes. "But we hit Saddam for one simple reason:
because we could, and because he deserved it and because he
was right at the heart of that world."

Of course, Friedman admits that this rationale contradicts the
"stated reason" for the attack: "I argued before the war," he
says, "that Saddam posed no [immediate] threat to America,
and had no links with Al Qaeda, and that we couldn't take the
nation to war 'on the wings of a lie.'"

Wings of a lie? With friends like that, who needs political
enemies to call for a Congressional investigation?

Even those who hold closest to the Bush administration's
arguments have been forced to make some startling admissions.
Kenneth Pollack, author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for
Invading Iraq, is no peacenik. Yet, even while contending that
troops will find Saddam's bombs, he admits that such weapons
never justified quick action.

"Why was it necessary to put aside all of our other foreign policy
priorities to go to war with Iraq in the spring of 2003?...
[D]istressingly, there seems to be more than a little truth to
claims that some members of the administration skewed,
exaggerated and even distorted raw intelligence to coax the
American people and reluctant allies into going to war against
Iraq.
"Needless to say," writes Pollack, "if the public felt Iraq was still
several years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon rather than
just a matter of months, there probably would have been much
less support for the war."

Are these the people White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer
had in mind when he labeled critiques of the administration
"conspiracy theories" and "nonsense"?

President Bush goes back and forth between claiming that we
will certainly locate weapons of mass destruction in the future,
and that such weapons have already been found. Poll numbers
from the University of Maryland show that at least a third of
Americans believe the latter idea, which the right-wing National
Review characterizes as a "mistake" made by a "frustrated
president." Then again, 22 percent think that these weapons
were actually deployed by Saddam Hussein during the conflict.
The Bush administration has a clear self-interest in perpetuating
this confusion. But that doesn't mean the press corps should be
playing along. When even the apologists are saying that the
president led the country to war on false pretenses, reporters
have ample reason to be searching the depths of the WMD
scandal. And we all have reason to be outraged.

[Catherine Woodgold]

Chris ) writes:
> Gen. Tommy Franks gave a stark assessment of the situation late last
> week, warning that U.S. troops may have to remain in Iraq for another four
> years.

Why? Are the people in charge of the U.S. army planning to try
to prevent democratic elections in Iraq for that long? What are
they trying to accomplish?
--
Cathy

[R. Steve Walz]

Catherine Woodgold wrote:
>
> Chris ) writes:
> > Gen. Tommy Franks gave a stark assessment of the situation late last
> > week, warning that U.S. troops may have to remain in Iraq for another four
> > years.
>
> Why? Are the people in charge of the U.S. army planning to try
> to prevent democratic elections in Iraq for that long? What are
> they trying to accomplish?
> --
> Cathy
-----------------
The prevention of an Islamic state that we'll have to nuke.
Steve

[Chris]

http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=721

Released: July 18, 2003

Bush Job Performance Slips to 53% Positive,
46%
Negative; More Voters (47%) Say It's Time for Someone New Than Say He
Deserves Re-election; Two-in-Three Say it Makes No Difference if WMDs
Are Never Found, According to Newest Zogby America Poll

President George W. Bush's job performance
rating has slipped to 53% positive, his lowest since the terrorist
attacks in 2001, according to a poll of1,004 likely U.S. voters by
Zogby International. His negative rating reached 46%, just under his
pre-9/11 unfavorable of 49%.

[Chris]

This is why only a civilian-based anti-war protest movement can truly
"support the troops." When the troops themselves try to voice
criticism, they get stepped on like bugs.

Support the troops. Bring them home!

Chris (USA)


http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/07/18/MN248299.DTL

Pentagon May Punish GIs Who Spoke Out on TV

Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer

Fallujah, Iraq -- Morale is dipping pretty low among U.S. soldiers as
they stew
in Iraq's broiling heat, get shot at by an increasingly hostile
population and get repeated orders to extend their tours of duty.

Ask any grunt standing guard on a 115-degree day what he or she thinks
of the
open-ended Iraq occupation, and you'll get an earful of colorful
complaints.

But going public isn't always easy, as soldiers of the Army's Second
Brigade,
Third Infantry Division found out after "Good Morning America" aired
their
complaints.

The brigade's soldiers received word this week from the Pentagon that
it was
extending their stay, with a vague promise to send them home by
September if
the security situation allows. They've been away from home since
September,
and this week's announcement was the third time their mission has been
extended.

It was bad news for the division's 12,000 homesick soldiers, who were
at the
forefront of the force that overthrew Saddam Hussein's government and
moved
into Baghdad in early April.

On Wednesday morning, when the ABC news show reported from Fallujah,
where the division is based, the troops gave the reporters an earful.
One
soldier said he felt like he'd been "kicked in the guts, slapped in
the face."
Another demanded that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld quit.

The retaliation from Washington was swift.

Careers Over For Some

"It was the end of the world," said one officer Thursday. "It went all
the way up to President Bush and back down again on top of us. At
least six of us here will lose our careers."

First lesson for the troops, it seemed: Don't ever talk to the media
"on the
record" -- that is, with your name attached -- unless you're giving
the sort of
chin-forward, everything's-great message the Pentagon loves to hear.

Only two days before the ABC show, similarly bitter sentiments -- with
no
names attached -- were voiced in an anonymous e-mail circulating
around the
Internet, allegedly from "the soldiers of the Second Brigade, Third
ID."

"Our morale is not high or even low," the letter said. "Our morale is
nonexistent. We have been told twice that we were going home, and
twice we have received a 'stop' movement to stay in Iraq."

The message, whose authenticity could not be confirmed, concluded:
"Our
men and women deserve to be treated like the heroes they are, not like
farm
animals. Our men and women deserve to see their loved ones again and
deserve to come home."

After this one-two punch, it was perhaps natural that on Thursday, the
same
troops and officers who had been garrulous and outspoken in previous
visits
were quiet, and most declined to speak on the record. During a visit
to Fallujah, a small city about 30 miles west of Baghdad, military
officials expressed intense chagrin about the bad publicity. And they
slammed the ABC reporters for focusing on the soldiers' criticism of
Rumsfeld, Bush and other officials and implying that they are
unwilling to carry out their mission.

Complaints Called Routine

"Soldiers have bitched since the beginning of time," said Capt. James
Brownlee, the public affairs officer for the Second Brigade. "That's
part of being a soldier. They bitch. But what does 'bad morale' really
mean? That they're not combat-ready or loyal? Nobody here fits that
definition."

The nervousness of the brass has a venerable history. It has long been
a
practice in American democracy that the military do not criticize the
nation's
civilian leaders, as Gen. Douglas MacArthur found out in 1951, when he
criticized President Harry Truman's Korean War strategy -- and was
promptly
fired.

Yet several U.S. officers said privately that troop morale is indeed
low. "The
problem is not the heat," said one high-ranking officer. "Soldiers get
used to
that. The problem is getting orders to go home, so your wife gets all
psyched
about it, then getting them reversed, and then having the same process
two
more times."

In Baghdad, average soldiers from other Army brigades are eager to
spill
similar complaints.

"I'm not sure people in Washington really know what it's like here,"
said Corp.
Todd Burchard as he stood on a street corner, sweating profusely and
looking
bored. "We'll keep doing our jobs as best as anyone can, but we
shouldn't have
to still be here in the first place."

Nearby, Pfc. Jason Ring stood next to his Humvee. "We liberated Iraq.
Now the
people here don't want us here, and guess what? We don't want to be
here
either," he said. "So why are we still here? Why don't they bring us
home?"

[Chris]

http://www.sunspot.net/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.witcover.18jul18.story

Look Who's Rewriting History Now

By Jules Witcover
Baltimore Sun

Friday 18 July 2003

While the world continues to parse President Bush's 16 little words in
his State
of the Union message on Iraq's alleged try to buy nuclear fuel in
Africa, it seems to have ignored his latest contribution to, as he
likes to say, "revisionist history."

In an exchange with reporters the other day after the White House
visit of U.N.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the president offered this to explain
why he
invaded Iraq:

"The fundamental question is, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons
program?
And the answer is, absolutely. And we gave him a chance to allow the
inspectors
in, and he wouldn't let them in. And therefore, after a reasonable
request, we
decided to remove him from power, along with other nations, so as to
make
sure he was not a threat to the United States and our friends and
allies in the
region."

What? Unless memory fails, Mr. Hussein did let the weapons inspectors
in, and
they had to be withdrawn for their own safety when Mr. Bush decided to
bypass
them and the U.N. Security Council and proceed with his invasion of
Iraq.

Surprisingly, neither The New York Times nor many other newspapers
paid any
attention to this colossal misstatement. The Washington Post, in a
Page One
story focusing on the faulty intelligence controversy, did note that
Mr. Bush had said he had given the Iraqi dictator "a chance to allow
the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."

But the Post story merely observed that "the president's assertion
that the war
began because Iraq did not admit inspectors appeared to contradict the
events
leading up to the war this spring: Hussein had, in fact, admitted the
inspectors
and Bush had opposed extending their work because he did not believe
them
effective."

At the regular White House press briefing the next day, the
presidential press
secretary, Scott McClellan, was asked why Mr. Bush had said what he
did -- a
patently false reconstruction of what had happened, in justification
of going to
war.

Mr. McClellan put this evasive spin on Mr. Bush's clear words: "Yes, I
think he
was referring to the fact that Saddam Hussein had a long history of
deceiving
inspectors. Saddam Hussein was not complying with [U.N.] Resolution
1441,
and he was doing everything he could to thwart the inspectors and keep
them
from doing their job. So that's what he was referring to."

A reporter later asked Mr. McClellan whether he was "clarifying" what
Mr. Bush
had said "or conceding that he misspoke." Mr. McClellan repeated his
answer.
Well, a reporter said, "people misspeak all the time. It's possible
that he did
misspeak." McClellan replied: "It's what I've said. I've addressed
this two or three times now."

This is the attitude at the Bush White House when the head man makes a
totally
erroneous statement on how the war began. Does he really believe what
he
said? If he misspoke, why not just say so? In any event, the handling
doesn't
bode well for the chances of getting a credible answer from this
president and
his minions about this critical question.

In the same comment, Mr. Bush again said the question was whether Mr.
Hussein had "a weapons program." But that was not the question at the
time. It
was not whether he ever had one. It was whether he had actual weapons
in a
state of readiness to pose that famous "imminent threat" to us and our
friends,
warranting the pre-emptive use of force.

This is more of the same dissembling that has marked the president's
effort to
justify first-strike military action from the start. It's not enough
for the house flack to come out and "explain" what the president
really meant to say.

A president's words carry more weight, and can have a greater
influence on
world events, not simply on domestic politics, than those of anyone
else. The
country, and even Mr. Bush's own administration, can't afford more of
his
careless, or deceptive, comments.

[Chris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/20/opinion/20BENJ.html

The Next Debate: Al Qaeda Link

By Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon
The New York Times

Sunday 20 July 2003

WASHINGTON - In all the debate over the disputed claims in President
Bush's State of the Union address, we must not forget to scrutinize an
equally important, and equally suspect, reason given by the
administration for toppling Saddam Hussein: Iraq's supposed links to
terrorists.

The invasion of Iraq, after all, was billed as Phase II in the war on terror
that began after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But was there ever a
credible basis for carrying that battle to Iraq?

Don't misunderstand - we should all be glad to see the Iraqi people freed
from Saddam Hussein's tyranny, and the defeat of Iraq did spell the
demise of the world's No. 4 state sponsor of international terrorism (Iran,
Syria and Sudan all have more blood on their hands in the last decade).
But the connection the administration asserted between Iraq and Al
Qaeda, the organization that made catastrophic terrorism a reality, seems
more uncertain than ever.

In making its case for war, the administration dismissed the arguments
of experts who noted that despite some contacts between Baghdad and
Osama bin Laden's followers over the years, there was no strong
evidence of a substantive relationship. As members of the National
Security Council staff from 1994 to 1999, we closely examined nearly a
decade's worth of intelligence and we became convinced, like many of
our colleagues in the intelligence community, that the religious radicals of
Al Qaeda and the secularists of Baathist Iraq simply did not trust one
another or share sufficiently compelling interests to work together.

But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised that the Bush
administration had "bulletproof evidence" of a Qaeda-Iraq link, and
Secretary of State Colin Powell made a similar case to the United
Nations. Such claims now look as questionable as the allegation that Iraq
was buying uranium in Niger.

In the 14 weeks since the fall of Baghdad, coalition forces have not
brought to light any significant evidence demonstrating the bond between
Iraq and Al Qaeda. Uncovering such a link should be much easier than
finding weapons of mass destruction. Instead of having to inspect
hundreds of suspected weapons sites around the country, military and
intelligence officials need only comb through the files of Iraq's intelligence
agency and a handful of other government ministries.

Our intelligence experts have been doing exactly that since April and so
far there has been no report of any proof (and we can assume that any
supporting information would have quickly been publicized). Of the more
than 3,000 Qaeda operatives arrested around the world, only a handful of
prisoners in Guantánamo - all with an incentive to please their captors -
have claimed there was cooperation between Osama bin Laden's
organization and Saddam Hussein's regime, and their remarks have yet
to be confirmed by any of the high-ranking Iraqi officials now in American
hands.

Indeed, most new reports concerning Al Qaeda and Iraq have been of
another nature. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, the two
highest-ranking Qaeda operatives in custody, have told investigators that
Mr. bin Laden shunned cooperation with Saddam Hussein. A United
Nations team investigating global ties of the bin Laden group reported
last month that they found no evidence of a Qaeda-Iraq connection.

In addition, one Central Intelligence Agency official told The Washington
Post that a review panel of retired intelligence operatives put together by
the agency found that although there were some ties among individuals
in the two camps, "it was not at all clear there was any coordination or
joint activities." And Rand Beers, the senior director for counterterrorism
on the National Security Council who resigned earlier this year, has said
that on the basis of the intelligence he saw, he did not believe there was a
significant relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

The Congressional oversight committees evaluating the administration's
use of intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have said they
will also examine whether the administration manipulated information
regarding Iraq's involvement in terrorism. The terrorism issue must not be
given short shrift because of the current controversy over claims of Iraq's
unconventional weapons. The truth is, we knew for decades that Iraq had
nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs - yet it was only after
9/11 that these programs were viewed as an intolerable threat that
necessitated a regime change.

This is not only a question of political accountability - it also bears on our
nation's fundamental approach to security. United States policy changed
dramatically when the Bush administration, lacking compelling evidence
of an Iraq-Qaeda link, decided to base the Qaeda part of its pro-war
argument on a hypothetical situation. "Iraq could decide on any given day
to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or
individual terrorists," President Bush said in October. "Alliance with
terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving
any fingerprints."

But this scenario is extremely unlikely. For years now the world's leading
state sponsors of terrorism have had no confidence that they could carry
out attacks against the United States undetected. That is why this brand of
terrorism has been on the wane.


After it became clear to Libya that the United States could prove its
responsibility for the 1988 attack on Pan Am 103 - and United Nations
sanctions were imposed - it got out of the business of supporting attacks
on Americans. After American and Kuwaiti intelligence traced a plot to kill
former President George H. W. Bush in 1993 to Baghdad, the Iraqi regime
also stopped trying to carry out terrorist attacks against America. And
when the Clinton administration made clear that it knew Iran was behind
the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, Tehran ceased
plotting terrorist strikes against American interests.

Because of America's intelligence and law enforcement capacities, the
world's outlaw states know that they will pay a high price for sponsoring
terrorists act against us - and an overwhelming one should they assist in
attacks involving weapons of mass destruction. That is why Iraq, Iran,
Libya, Syria and some 20 other countries with chemical and biological
weapons have never, as far as we know, given one to terrorists.

Of course, the return of state-backed terror against America cannot be
ruled out. And we are right to be concerned that North Korea, the world's
most unpredictable regime, might sell a nuclear weapon to terrorists. But
this much is clear: all states, even rogue ones, have a strong conservative
impulse for self-preservation.

American policy must recognize this clear division between the old
state-sponsored terrorism, which we have shown we can deter, and the
new, religiously motivated attacks. First, we should think long and hard
before seeking regime change as a means of behavior modification.
Those who chafe to topple the mullahs in Iran, for example, court
unforeseen consequences that may ultimately damage America's
interests.

If we were to confirm that extreme elements like the Iranian Revolutionary
Guards are harboring Qaeda operatives, we would need to press hard
diplomatically, economically and even be prepared to threaten military
action. But a concerted effort to upend the regime could well backfire,
ending the slow but nonetheless clear evolution of Iran into a genuine
democracy.

Second and most important, the Bush administration should focus more
on Al Qaeda, the only terrorist group that poses an imminent,
undeterrable danger. New instability in Afghanistan and the continued
spread of jihadist ideology in the Islamic world mean that the prospects
for another 9/11 are growing. America has been fortunate in capturing
some high-ranking terrorists, but we still lack a comprehensive program
to deal with a growing global insurgency and the long-term threat of
radical Islam, for which intelligence and law enforcement will not suffice.

Rogue regimes are bad for the world and worse for the people forced to
live under them. Over time, we can use diplomacy - including coercion -
and deterrence to bring about change. For now, however, the direst threat
to Americans comes not from the mullahs of Tehran, but from the
mass-murderers of Al Qaeda.

[Catherine Woodgold]

> http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/07/18/MN248299.DTL
>
> Pentagon May Punish GIs Who Spoke Out on TV
>
> Robert Collier, Chronicle Staff Writer
>
> Fallujah, Iraq ...

> Nearby, Pfc. Jason Ring stood next to his Humvee. "We liberated Iraq.
> Now the
> people here don't want us here, and guess what? We don't want to be
> here
> either," he said. "So why are we still here? Why don't they bring us
> home?"

I'm still wondering this same question.

What is the U.S. government giving out as the official
reason the soldiers are still there?

And what are the real reasons?
--
Cathy

[Catherine Woodgold]

> Bush & the Media Cover up the Jihad Schoolbook Scandal


> Have you heard about the Afghan Jihad schoolbook
> scandal?

> Or perhaps I should say, "Have you heard about the
> Afghan Jihad schoolbook scandal that's waiting to
> happen?"

> Because it has been almost unreported in the Western
> media that the US government shipped - and continues to
> ship - millions of Islamist (that's short for Islamic
> fundamentalist) textbooks into Afghanistan. ...


You can read the whole article at:

http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/jihad.htm

--
Cathy

[Chris]

(Catherine Woodgold) wrote in message >...
> > Bush & the Media Cover up the Jihad Schoolbook Scandal
>
>
> > Have you heard about the Afghan Jihad schoolbook
> > scandal?
>
> > Or perhaps I should say, "Have you heard about the
> > Afghan Jihad schoolbook scandal that's waiting to
> > happen?"
>
> > Because it has been almost unreported in the Western
> > media that the US government shipped - and continues to
> > ship - millions of Islamist (that's short for Islamic
> > fundamentalist) textbooks into Afghanistan. ...
>
>
> You can read the whole article at:
>
> http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/jihad.htm

It is shocking that the USA has been writing, printing, and
shipping school textbooks to Afghanistan for decades which according
to the March 23, 2002 Washington Post "were filled with talk of jihad
and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have
served since then [i.e., since the violent destruction of the Afghan
secular government in the early 1990s] as the Afghan
school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the
American-produced books..." Yet at the same time, it is not
surprising when viewed in the context of US policy towards Afghanistan
over the last twenty years.

The blood debt of Americans (myself included) to the Afghani
people is enormous. It was the USA which deliberately provoked the
USSR into invading in the first place, according to Carter-era
National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski. In a 1998 interview he gave to the French magazine, _Le
Nouvel Observateur_ (Jan. 15-21), Brzezinski revealed that US covert
military aid to the Afghan mujahideen (elements of what would later
become al-Qa'eda and the Taliban) began six months *before* the
Soviets invaded, not afterwards as Americans had long been misled into
believing. This was done with the calculated hope that it would
"induce a Soviet military intervention" thus leading them into their
own Vietnam-style quagmire. The gambit worked. As a result, tens of
thousands of Soviet boys have died, along with millions of Afghanis,
most of them children. And decades later the country continues to be
a festering pit of human rights abuses, atrocities, ethnic cleansing,
torture, disease, extreme poverty and misery - a monumental tragedy on
a scale as vast as the Hindu Kush.

The Nouvel Observateur interviewer then asked Brzezinski the
obvious question. Did he have any regrets? Here is Mr. Brzezinski's
response:

"Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It
had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you
want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the
border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of
giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years,
Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a
conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup
of the Soviet empire."

The US government, led by the so-called "human rights
administration" of Jimmy Carter, deliberately set the first domino in
motion. And the deadly dominos continue to fall, a generation later.

So it makes sense that for years the USA shipped planeloads of
children's school books calculated to teach an entire generation to
devote themselves to jihad against foreign infidels.

Every American should hang their head in shame - I already am.
We helped plunge that country into a nightmare from which they still
have yet to awake, treating them as an expendable pawn in our Great
Power maneuvers with our now-defunct rival, the USSR; a entire lost
generation of Afghanis has been the price, due in part to our
deliberate attempt to inculate them with Islamist extremist ideology.
And still there is no end in sight.

If there is anyone on this thread who is prepared to argue that
America's Afghan adventure has been a "success" I would be most
intriqued to hear you defend that curious assertion. When I look at
Afghanistan, I see nothing but an ongoing human tragedy - a disaster
area - a metaphorical puddle of pestilent mud left behind in the
bootprint of a rogue superpower's headlong march for global
domination.

Chris (USA)

[Chris]

(Catherine Woodgold) wrote in message >...
> > Bush & the Media Cover up the Jihad Schoolbook Scandal
>
>
> > Have you heard about the Afghan Jihad schoolbook
> > scandal?
>
> > Or perhaps I should say, "Have you heard about the
> > Afghan Jihad schoolbook scandal that's waiting to
> > happen?"
>
> > Because it has been almost unreported in the Western
> > media that the US government shipped - and continues to
> > ship - millions of Islamist (that's short for Islamic
> > fundamentalist) textbooks into Afghanistan. ...
>
>
> You can read the whole article at:
>
> http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/jihad.htm

It is shocking that the USA has been writing, printing, and
shipping school textbooks to Afghanistan for decades which according
to the March 23, 2002 Washington Post "were filled with talk of jihad
and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have
served since then [i.e., since the violent destruction of the Afghan
secular government in the early 1990s] as the Afghan
school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the
American-produced books..." Yet at the same time, it is not
surprising when viewed in the context of US policy towards Afghanistan
over the last twenty years.

The blood debt of Americans (myself included) to the Afghani
people is enormous. It was the USA which deliberately provoked the
USSR into invading in the first place, according to Carter-era
National Security Advisor Zbigniew
Brzezinski. In a 1998 interview he gave to the French magazine, _Le
Nouvel Observateur_ (Jan. 15-21), Brzezinski revealed that US covert
military aid to the Afghan mujahideen (elements of what would later
become al-Qa'eda and the Taliban) began six months *before* the
Soviets invaded, not afterwards as Americans had long been misled into
believing. This was done with the calculated hope that it would
"induce a Soviet military intervention" thus leading them into their
own Vietnam-style quagmire. The gambit worked. As a result, tens of
thousands of Soviet boys have died, along with millions of Afghanis,
most of them children. And decades later the country continues to be
a festering pit of human rights abuses, atrocities, ethnic cleansing,
torture, disease, extreme poverty and misery - a monumental tragedy on
a scale as vast as the Hindu Kush.

The Nouvel Observateur interviewer then asked Brzezinski the
obvious question. Did he have any regrets? Here is Mr. Brzezinski's
response:

"Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It
had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you
want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the
border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of
giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years,
Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a
conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup
of the Soviet empire."

The US government, led by the so-called "human rights
administration" of Jimmy Carter, deliberately set the first domino in
motion. And the deadly dominos continue to fall, a generation later.

So it makes sense that for years the USA shipped planeloads of
children's school books calculated to teach an entire generation to
devote themselves to jihad against foreign infidels.

Every American should hang their head in shame - I already am.
We helped plunge that country into a nightmare from which they still
have yet to awake, treating them as an expendable pawn in our Great
Power maneuvers with our now-defunct rival, the USSR; a entire lost
generation of Afghanis has been the price, due in part to our
deliberate attempt to inculate them with Islamist extremist ideology.
And still there is no end in sight.

If there is anyone on this thread who is prepared to argue that
America's Afghan adventure has been a "success" I would be most
intriqued to hear you defend that curious assertion. When I look at
Afghanistan, I see nothing but an ongoing human tragedy - a disaster
area - a metaphorical puddle of pestilent mud left behind in the
bootprint of a rogue superpower's headlong march for global
domination.

Chris (USA)

[R. Steve Walz]

Chris wrote:
>
> (Catherine Woodgold) wrote in message >...[i]
> > > Bush & the Media Cover up the Jihad Schoolbook Scandal
> >
> >
> > > Have you heard about the Afghan Jihad schoolbook
> > > scandal?
> >
> > > Or perhaps I should say, "Have you heard about the
> > > Afghan Jihad schoolbook scandal that's waiting to
> > > happen?"
> >
> > > Because it has been almost unreported in the Western
> > > media that the US government shipped - and continues to
> > > ship - millions of Islamist (that's short for Islamic
> > > fundamentalist) textbooks into Afghanistan. ...
> >
> >
> > You can read the whole article at:
> >
> > http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/jared/jihad.htm
>
> It is shocking that the USA has been writing, printing, and
> shipping school textbooks to Afghanistan for decades which according
> to the March 23, 2002 Washington Post "were filled with talk of jihad
> and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have
> served since then as the Afghan
> school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the
> American-produced books..." Yet at the same time, it is not
> surprising when viewed in the context of US policy towards Afghanistan
> over the last twenty years.
>
> The blood debt of Americans (myself included) to the Afghani
> people is enormous. It was the USA which deliberately provoked the
> USSR into invading in the first place, according to Carter-era
> National Security Advisor Zbigniew
> Brzezinski. In a 1998 interview he gave to the French magazine, _Le
> Nouvel Observateur_ (Jan. 15-21), Brzezinski revealed that US covert
> military aid to the Afghan mujahideen (elements of what would later
> become al-Qa'eda and the Taliban) began six months *before* the
> Soviets invaded, not afterwards as Americans had long been misled into
> believing. This was done with the calculated hope that it would
> "induce a Soviet military intervention" thus leading them into their
> own Vietnam-style quagmire. The gambit worked. As a result, tens of
> thousands of Soviet boys have died, along with millions of Afghanis,
> most of them children. And decades later the country continues to be
> a festering pit of human rights abuses, atrocities, ethnic cleansing,
> torture, disease, extreme poverty and misery - a monumental tragedy on
> a scale as vast as the Hindu Kush.
>
> The Nouvel Observateur interviewer then asked Brzezinski the
> obvious question. Did he have any regrets? Here is Mr. Brzezinski's
> response:
>
> "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It
> had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you
> want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the
> border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of
> giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years,
> Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a
> conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup
> of the Soviet empire."
>
> The US government, led by the so-called "human rights
> administration" of Jimmy Carter, deliberately set the first domino in
> motion. And the deadly dominos continue to fall, a generation later.
>
> So it makes sense that for years the USA shipped planeloads of
> children's school books calculated to teach an entire generation to
> devote themselves to jihad against foreign infidels.
>
> Every American should hang their head in shame - I already am.
> We helped plunge that country into a nightmare from which they still
> have yet to awake, treating them as an expendable pawn in our Great
> Power maneuvers with our now-defunct rival, the USSR; a entire lost
> generation of Afghanis has been the price, due in part to our
> deliberate attempt to inculate them with Islamist extremist ideology.
> And still there is no end in sight.
>
> If there is anyone on this thread who is prepared to argue that
> America's Afghan adventure has been a "success" I would be most
> intriqued to hear you defend that curious assertion. When I look at
> Afghanistan, I see nothing but an ongoing human tragedy - a disaster
> area - a metaphorical puddle of pestilent mud left behind in the
> bootprint of a rogue superpower's headlong march for global
> domination.
>
> Chris (USA)
--------------
The death of the whole Afghani people would be superior to leaving
them in thrall to the Taliban.
Steve

[Chris]

(Catherine Woodgold) wrote:

> What is the U.S. government giving out as the official
> reason the soldiers are still there?
>
> And what are the real reasons?

Here is one real reason.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2003/28/we_455_01.html


The World According to Halliburton
—By Michael Scherer, Mother Jones



July 23, 2003 Issue

The Mother Jones website is featuring a
fascinating (and frightening) map of the Halliburton empire. Created
by Michael Scherer, this interactive map lets you explore the tax
havens, defense-related contracts, and federal energy subsidies in the
company's global web consisting of offices in 70 countries and annual
revenues of $12.6 billion.

Since Dick Cheney took over as CEO of
Halliburton in 1995, after serving as secretary of defense during Gulf
War I, the company has had tight political connections -- revenues
rose 26 percent in his first year. "Federal investigators looking into
charges that Halliburton defrauded taxpayers said that company
officials "had the upper hand at the Pentagon because they knew the
process like the back of their hand."

Scherer shows that Halliburton continues to
remain well-connected. The tax dollars the company receives -- $2.2
billion in defense-related contracts and generous subsidies for
profitable pipeline projects -- "couldn't come at a better time for
Halliburton," Scherer states, "its share price has collapsed under the
weight of asbestos lawsuits, a federal investigation into its
accounting practices, and a drop in oil prices." And Halliburton adds
insult to injury to the American people by avoiding paying taxes,
Scherer notes. "In 1995, the company had nine subsidiaries in the
Cayman Islands, Bermuda, and other countries that serve as tax havens.
By 2002, it had 58."
-- Joel Stonington


http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2003/28/we_455_01.html

[Chris]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42718-2003Jul24.html

Deutch Sees Consequences in Failed Search for Arms
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer

Friday 25 July 2003

Former CIA director John M. Deutch told Congress yesterday that
failure to
find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq would represent "an
intelligence
failure . . . of massive proportions."

"It means that . . . leaders of the American public based [their]
support for the most serious foreign policy judgments -- the decision
to go to war -- on an incorrect intelligence judgment," Deutch said
during testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence.

The impact, he said, would be felt "the next time military
intervention is
judged necessary to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction
-- for
example in North Korea -- there will be skepticism about the quality
of our
intelligence."

The House panel, along with its Senate counterpart, is holding
hearings on
the handling of intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs amid
complaints by
Democrats that the administration may have exaggerated the threat
posed by
the now-toppled government of president Saddam Hussein to justify war.

Deutch said "it seems increasingly likely" that Iraq may have not
continued its chemical and biological weapons programs after the 1991
Persian Gulf War.
But Deutch and another former CIA director, R. James Woolsey, told the
panel
that they expected U.S. forces eventually would turn up evidence of
chemical
and biological weapons production, perhaps along with stocks of
chemical and
biological agents or weapons.

Former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay, in Iraq to
coordinate
the weapons search for CIA Director George J. Tenet, has been
interviewing
lower-level Iraqi scientists and reviewing tons of documents. He has
been
pulling together outlines of research and development programs and
references to chemical and biological precursors, according to senior
administration officials.

Kay and Army Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, deputy director of the
Defense
Intelligence Agency who runs the military side of the program, are
scheduled to
return next week to brief the Pentagon and appear on Capitol Hill.

At his Senate Armed Services Committee reappointment hearing
yesterday,
Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said
that in
recent days U.S. teams had discovered artillery shells with a
different type of
casings. "Whether or not there were chemicals or biological in there,
we don't
know. We have to test that," Myers said.

In a related matter, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked FBI
Director
Robert S. Mueller III to investigate whether Bush administration
officials
identified the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson as a
clandestine
CIA officer, an allegation published on July 14 in a syndicated column
by Robert
Novak.

Wilson, a critic of Bush's decision to invade Iraq, carried out a
CIA-generated mission to Niger in February 2002 to determine the
validity of
intelligence reports that Iraq had sought uranium oxide from that
country for its nuclear program. Wilson's report back to the CIA cast
strong doubt about the
reports.

In the column, Novak named Wilson's wife as an "agency operative
on
weapons of mass destruction," adding: "Two senior administration
officials told
me that Wilson's wife suggested sending him to Niger" to carry out the
investigation.

Schumer said the disclosure of the wife's name and CIA
relationship "was
part of an apparent attempt to impugn Wilson's credibility and to
intimidate
others from speaking out against the administration." He called for
the FBI to
investigate Novak's source, because intentionally identifying a covert
CIA
officer is a crime.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan has been asked twice
this
week about charges the information was deliberately leaked to Novak,
and both
times responded that "this is not the way this president or this White
House
operates."

McClellan said he has "no idea" who the sources for the
information were,
and added that "certainly no one in this White House would have been
given
authority to take such a step."

[Chris]

http://www.msnbc.com/news/943801.asp

Body Counts
Uday and Qusay's deaths will not stop the guerrilla war. Why Iraq could
be worse than Vietnam

Newsweek Web Exclusive

Those of us who've covered the Third World's wars are used to looking at
mugshots of the dead, whole photo albums of corpses.

SOME HUMAN-RIGHTS organizations collect them to show the brutally
murdered victims of evil dictators. Some generals collect them (I'm thinking of
a Turkish general in particular) to show, body by body, their victories over
elusive guerrillas. And sometimes the victims in one collection and the
guerrillas in the other are the same. That's the problem with
counterinsurgency: separating "the innocent" from "the enemy."

The new photographs of Saddam Hussein's sons--close-ups of bearded
faces on bloody plastic--look pretty much like any other cadavers dragged
out of a firefight, and better than many. Uday's face was twisted from a
wound slashing across the nose, but not imploded beyond recognition, as
such faces often are. Qusay's was unscarred, grimacing.

For American forces these were all but the baddest of the bad guys. For
most Iraqis, they were a bad dream that seemed never to end. No question of
innocents here. Uday and Qusay were the enemy, full stop, and when they
died, so did even the remotest chance in hell of a Saddamite dynasty.

But let's not make too much of this triumph. The body counting is far from
over in Iraq.

As the death toll for Americans goes up day by day and folks back home
are having to think about what it means to fight what's now acknowledged to
be a guerrilla war, you're starting to hear comparisons with the long,
soul-destroying counterinsurgency in Vietnam. Well, Iraq could be even
worse.

In Nam, there was a government, however feeble and corrupt, to invite us
in. There were structures, including a bureaucracy and an army, that could
be improved, advised, derided or deplored--but which at least existed. In Iraq,
thanks to the American blunders and indecisiveness of the last three months,
there is no army. There are precious few police. And there's barely a
bureaucracy to speak of. The United States has to do just about everything,
but it looks as if it didn't prepare for anything. "People in the
conspiracy-minded Arab world just can't believe you could make such
mistakes," a Jordanian business consultant told me this afternoon. "They see
a great plot to dismember an Arab state or whatever. But they're just
misreading your incompetence."

The Iraqi people themselves were not implicated in the overthrow of the
dictator, any more than they were involved (apart from the bounty-hunting
informant) in killing his two sons. This was a favor the Iraqis did not ask, a
revolution in which they did not participate and a debt of gratitude they do not
feel. Even for those many Iraqis who loathed Saddam and his sons, there is
something humiliating about the spectacle of Uncle Sam arriving on their
doorstep like a deus ex machina to dictate their history. Now they don't want
the Americans to stay, but they're afraid for them to go and leave an even
more dangerous power vacuum. So there are many Iraqis who say
reluctantly that they approve of the U.S. presence.

Winning a guerrilla war requires more than just presence, however. The
response to rebellion has to be clear, direct, very brutal and very invasive not
only for the enemy but for the innocents. And we shouldn't kid ourselves
about this. There is a terrible sameness in the history of effective
counterinsurgencies. As a Guatemalan general once told me after shooting
up the highlands of his country from a helicopter, the people in areas where
insurgents operate need to be taught a simple lesson: we, the government,
can protect you from the guerrillas, but the guerrillas cannot protect you from
us, and you are going to have to choose. It took years, internment camps and
horrific human-rights abuses, but eventually the Guatemalan rebels were
crushed. The Turkish general with his accordion-album photos of Kurdish
corpses won a similar victory in the east of his country. As did the Algerian
generals in theirs. But it's hard to call those triumphs a liberation, which is
what Operation Iraqi Freedom has claimed to be.

So no wonder Washington wants to believe Saddam and his late sons are
the inspiration for those guerrilla attacks that cost the lives of another three
Americans just today. No wonder Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz clings to the idea that paid assassins are at the heart of resistance
to the benevolent American presence. And we should all hope that's the
case, because if it is, then the end of Saddam, which may come soon, could
really mean an end to the war.

But Adnan Abu Odeh, a former advisor to Jordan's King Hussein and one
of the region's real wise men, offers another scenario. He suggests the Iraqi
people see themselves struggling against two enemies now: Saddam on the
one hand, the American occupiers on the other. "Ironically, if Saddam is killed
as well as his two sons," says Abu Odeh, "that will accelerate the process
of seeing the Americans as the real enemy."

The dynasty is over. The dying is not.

[Chris]

http://www.msnbc.com/news/943255.asp

Excessive Force?

BY ROD NORDLAND,
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
July 23, 2003

It was much-needed tangible proof that America was making progress
in the war in Iraq. After several weeks of drooping morale and a
daily, if single-digit body count, the U.S. military on Tuesday
announced its soldiers had killed Saddam Hussein's sons in a ferocious
firefight in their Mosul hideout.

AMERICAN OFFICIALS crowed about it, troops around Iraq high-fived
each other, friendlyIraqis fired their guns in the air in celebration.
Even the stock markets rose on the news.

Certainly only a few diehards mourned the passing of Uday and Qusay
Hussein; the regime's Caligula and its Heir Apparent were if anything
despised and feared even more than their dad. But as details became
clearer of the raid that eliminated what the U.S. military calls High
Value Targets (HVTs) Nos. 2 and 3, a lot of people in the intelligence
community were left wondering: why weren't they just taken alive?

At a news briefing today, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the commander
of U.S. forces in Iraq, squirmed his way past that question
repeatedly. It was, he said, the decision of the commander on the
ground based on the circumstances and his judgment--"and it was the
right decision." But was it? Who beside the sons might have better
information about the one HVT that really matters, Saddam? "The whole
operation was a cockup," said a British intelligence officer. "There
was no need to go after four lightly armed men with such overwhelming
firepower. They would have been much more useful alive." But Sanchez
insisted it wasn't overkill. "Absolutely not. Our mission is to find,
kill or capture high-value targets. We had an enemy that was
barricaded and we had to take measures to neutralize the target."

U.S. forces were led to the brothers' hideout by a "walk-in," an
informant who came to them the night before to say they were staying
in a posh house in a residential district of the northern city, which
has large numbers of Saddam supporters. Twelve hours later, according
to Sanchez's account, U.S. forces had taken up blocking positions in
the neighborhood around the house, cutting off any escape routes. At
10 a.m., 12 hours after the first tip, a psy-ops team with an
interpreter and a bullhorn called on anyone inside to come out and
surrender. When there was no reply, soldiers entered the house and
began climbing the stairs--only to draw fire from a fortified upper
floor with bulletproofed windows and heavy doors. Three soldiers were
wounded on the stairs; a fourth was hit outside. U.S. troops retreated
and began "prepping the target"--Armyspeak for firing into it. They
used heavy machine guns mounted on Humvees outside, as well as light
cannons and grenade launchers. Then Kiowa helicopter gunships came in
and fired four rockets into the building. By noon, the Americans tried
to enter the building again, only to be fired on again, whereupon they
withdrew. This time they really poured the prep fire on, with
sustained machine-gun fire topped by a total of 10 TOW missiles fired
at near point-blank range. By 1:20 p.m., return fire had ceased and
U.S. forces entered the building. There they found four corpses--the
two brothers and two as-yet unidentified bodies. One of them appeared
to be a teenager, who might be Qusay's son. The only weapons: AK-47s
and pistols.

Against such lightly armed resistance, couldn't a siege or even a
teargas attack have done the job more efficiently, and perhaps
captured the HVTs alive? Sanchez repeated his mantra that the local
commander made the right decision and he wasn't going to second-guess
it. But a total of 200 heavily armed U.S. troops, backed by missiles,
armored personnel carriers and helicopters? An officer at the scene
made the improbable claim to a NEWSWEEK reporter that tear gas might
have hurt neighbors. As it was, there were no reported civilian
casualties with the much heavier weaponry; the house, which belonged
to a prominent local sheik, was set well away from others. "********,"
said one former Special Forces soldier. "A SWAT team could have taken
them. It didn't need a company."

The outcome was well-received abroad, but many Iraqis were not so
sure. "The death of Uday and Qusay is definitely going to be a turning
point," Sanchez said. U.S. officials expressed hope that it would
undermine the opposition U.S. forces have been encountering. But that
same day, two American soldiers were killed in an ambush in
Mosul--raising doubts about whether there would be a letup in the
opposition campaign of picking off U.S. troops. And many Iraqis
expressed doubt about whether they actually got the right guys. Saddam
and his son were well known for using body doubles, and Iraqis have
not seen the evidence themselves.

Many even refused to believe the military's account that the
victims' dental records matched (100 percent match in Qusay's case,
only 90 percent in Uday's, they said), and that four regime figures
had made positive IDs. Sanchez said among those identifying the bodies
was Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, Saddam's personal secretary and the
highest-ranking regime official in U.S. custody. Still Iraqis
expressed skepticism, which Sanchez acknowledged, saying that the
military is considering releasing pictures of the brothers' corpses. A
lot of pro-American Iraqis are saying they'd have rather seen them on
TV, being tried for their crimes. "There was no reason for us to rush
to failure," as Sanchez put it, when he was asked why the raid took so
long. But failing to take a little more time to get them alive may yet
prove to have been just such a failure.

[Byte Me]

"R. Steve Walz" > wrote in :

> Thomas Edward Lawrence is dead, and good ****ing riddance.
> Now we simply have to rid the world of Islam, and all the
> other vicious superstitious sheep-****er religions, like
> Baptists and Catholics and Jews.
> Steve
>

Not to mention racists and fascists.

--
################################################## ##############
'I told the priest, "don't count on any second coming...
God got His ass kicked the first time He came down here slumming"'
-- Concrete Blonde
################################################## ##############

[Chris]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/07/27/national1525EDT0539.DTL

Lawmakers Accuse Administration of Protecting Saudi Sentiment
with Secrecy

William C. Mann
Associated Press

Sunday 27 July 2003

12:39 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration should make
public the facts about Saudi Arabia's complicity with terrorists
rather than
worry about offending the kingdom, lawmakers said Sunday.

One senator said 95 percent of the classified pages of a
congressional
report released last week into the work of intelligence agencies
before the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was kept secret only to keep from
embarrassing
a foreign government.

"I think they're classified for the wrong reason," Sen. Richard
Shelby,
former vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told NBC's
"Meet the Press."

"I went back and read every one of those pages, thoroughly. ...
My
judgment is 95 percent of that information could be declassified,
become
uncensored so the American people would know," said Shelby, R-Ala.

Asked why the section was blacked out, Shelby said: "I think it
might be
embarrassing to international relations."

In unclassified pages of the report, released Thursday, several
unidentified government officials complained of a lack of Saudi
cooperation. "According to a U.S. government official, it was clear
from
about 1996 that the Saudi government would not cooperate with the
United
States on matters related to Osama bin Laden," the report says.

Bin Laden, head of the al-Qaida terrorist network, was born in
Saudi
Arabia to a prominent and rich family. He turned against the Saudi
government after it allowed the United States to station troops and
equipment in their country. The Saudi government revoked his
citizenship.

Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., former chairman of the Senate
Intelligence
Committee, accused the administration of using classification to
"disguise
and keep from the American people ineptitude and incompetence, which
was a contributing factor toward Sept. 11."

He said there might be parts of blanked section that would
compromise
sources or methods of intelligence-gathering, "but it would be a
sentence
or a paragraph, not 28 pages."

Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Graham, a Democratic presidential
candidate, would not confirm that Saudi Arabia is the country
discussed in
the pages; discussing classified information is a crime.

But he said, "High officials in this government, who I assume
were not
just rogue officials acting on their own, made substantial
contributions to
the support and well-being of two of these terrorists and facilitated
their
ability to plan, practice and then execute the tragedy of Sept. 11."

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers, who killed close to 3,000 people in
New York,
suburban Washington and Pennsylvania, were Saudis.

The current committee chairman, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., agreed
on
CBS' "Face the Nation" that too much was removed but said he expects
more to be revealed.

"I think at some future date it will be made public," Roberts
said. "I was
upset with the process, and I was upset with the amount of material
that
was redacted."

Only Roberts' counterpart on the House Intelligence Committee,
Rep.
Porter Goss, R-Fla., who formerly worked for the CIA, said the
administration was justified in its deletions. He said on NBC the
joint
committee recommended a full investigation of foreign involvement, and
"we do not want to contaminate that investigation."

He said he expects to pages to be revealed after the
investigation is
ended.

[Chris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/27/national/27WATE.html

Ex-Aide Says Nixon Agreed to Break-In at Watergate

By The Associated Press

Sunday 27 July 2003

WASHINGTON, July 26 (AP) - Three decades after Watergate, a
former
top aide to President Richard M. Nixon says that Nixon personally
ordered
the break-in that led to his resignation.

The aide, Jeb Stuart Magruder, previously had said only that John
Mitchell, the former attorney general who was running the Nixon
re-election
campaign in 1972, approved the plan to break into the Democratic
National
Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel and office complex near
the
White House and tap the telephone of the chairman, Larry O'Brien.

Mr. Magruder, in a PBS documentary that will be broadcast
Wednesday
and in an Associated Press interview last week, says he was meeting
with
Mr. Mitchell on March 30, 1972, when he heard Nixon tell Mr. Mitchell
over
the phone to go ahead with the plan.

The break-in occurred about two months later, on June 17, 1972.

Mr. Magruder, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and perjury
charges
stemming from the break-in and spent seven months in prison, explained
his three decades of silence about Nixon's culpability by saying,
"Nobody
ever asked me a question about that."

Some historians said they doubted the statements by Mr. Magruder,
who
was Nixon's deputy campaign director and deputy communications
director
at the White House. Stanley Kutler, an expert on Nixon's White House
tapes,
called it "the dubious word of a dubious character."

John Dean, the former White House counsel, said he was surprised
when Mr. Magruder recently told him that Nixon had encouraged the
break-in in advance.

"I have no reason to doubt that it happened as he describes it,"
Mr. Dean
said, "but I have never seen a scintilla of evidence that Nixon knew
about the
plans for the Watergate break-in."

In all, 25 people went to jail for their roles in the break-in or
the attempt to cover it up.

[Chris]

http://villagevoice.com/issues/0331/hentoff.php

Who Made George W. Bush Our King?
He Can Designate Any of Us an Enemy Combatant

By Nat Hentoff
VillageVoice.com

Friday 25 July 2003

Courts have no higher duty than protection of the individual
freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. This is especially true in time
of war, when our carefully crafted system of checks and balances must
accommodate the vital needs of national security while guarding the
liberties the Constitution promises all citizens. -Fourth Circuit Court of
Appeals judge Diana Gribbon Motz, dissenting, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld,
July 9.

Some of the most glorious illuminations of the Bill of Rights in
American history have been contained in Supreme Court dissents by,
among others, Louis Brandeis, William Brennan, Hugo Black, and
Thurgood Marshall. Equal to those was the stinging dissent by judge
Diana Gribbon Motz when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (8 to 4)
gave George W. Bush a fearsome power that can be found nowhere in
the Constitution-the sole authority to imprison an American citizen
indefinitely without charges or access to a lawyer.

This case is now on appeal to the Supreme Court, which will
determine whether this president-or his successors until the end of the
war on terrorism-can subvert the Bill of Rights to the peril of all of us.

Judge Motz began her dissent-which got only a couple of lines in the
brief coverage of the case in scattered media reporting-by stating
plainly what the Bush administration has done to scuttle the Bill of
Rights:

"For more than a year, a United States citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi,
has been labeled an enemy combatant and held in solitary
confinement in a Norfolk, Virginia, naval brig. He has not been charged
with a crime, let alone convicted of one. The Executive [the president]
will not state when, if ever, he will be released. Nor has the Executive
allowed Hamdi to appear in court, consult with counsel, or
communicate in any way with the outside world."

I have not seen what I am about to quote from her dissent anywhere
in the media. You might want to send what follows to your member of
Congress and senator. Judge Motz said accusingly:

"I fear that [this court] may also have opened the door to the indefinite
detention, without access to a lawyer or the courts, of any American
citizen, even one captured on American soil, who the Executive
designates an 'enemy combatant,' as long as the Executive asserts
that the area in which the citizen was detained was an 'active combat
zone,' and the detainee, deprived of access to the courts and counsel,
cannot dispute this fact." (Emphasis added).

As I have detailed in two previous columns ("A Citizen Shorn of All
Rights," Voice, January 1-7, 2003, and "Liberty's Court of Last Resort,"
Voice, January 29-February 4, 2003), Hamdi was taken into custody by
the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, and then declared an "enemy
combatant" by order of George W. Bush on the flimsiest of "evidence"
that he had been a soldier of the Taliban-an accusation that Hamdi has
not been able to rebut in a court of alleged law.

Judge Motz is not engaging in scare tactics when she says that with
the president having assumed the powers of an absolute monarch, in
this kind of case, any American citizen can be hauled off an American
street and stripped of all his or her rights. On June 5, Attorney General
John Ashcroft unequivocally told the House Judiciary Committee that
the streets of America are now "a war zone."

Furthermore, The Washington Post-in a July 13, 2002, lead editorial,
a year before the Motz Fourth Circuit dissent-warned of the increasing
tendency of the courts to defer to the dangerously overreaching
executive branch:

"FBI Director Robert Mueller has said that a sizable number of
people in this country are associated with terrorist groups, yet have so
far done nothing wrong [so] there is therefore no basis to indict them.
How many of them, one wonders, might the government [by bypassing
the courts] hold as enemy combatants? And how many of them would
later turn out to be something else entirely?"

But how much later would these innocent citizens-locked away until
the war on terrorism is over-be let out?

This is an unprecedentedly serious assault, folks, on the core of our
system of justice. As Judge Motz said in her passionate dissent, "[This
court's] decision marks the first time in our history that a federal court
has approved the elimination of protections afforded a citizen by the
Constitution solely on the basis of the Executive's designation of that
citizen as an enemy combatant, without testing the accuracy of the
designation. Neither the Constitution nor controlling precedent
sanctions this holding." (Emphasis added).

As for the government's "evidence" that Hamdi is an enemy
combatant, Judge Motz emphasizes that all the Defense Department
offered is a two-page, nine-paragraph statement by Michael Mobbs, a
special adviser for policy in the Defense Department. The buck stops
with Donald Rumsfeld.

As Judge Motz points out, the majority of the Fourth Circuit, in its
"breathtaking holding" relying on the Mobbs declaration, ruled that it is
"undisputed" that Hamdi was captured in a zone of active combat. This,
she charges, is "pure hearsay . . . a thin reed on which to rest
abrogation of constitutional rights, and one that collapses entirely upon
examination. For Hamdi has never been given the opportunity to
dispute any facts."

Before this case reached the Fourth Circuit, it was heard in Federal
District Court-with Hamdi unable to be present or to communicate at all
with his public defender, Frank Dunham, who therefore could not
contest the Mobbs declaration. Nevertheless, Judge Robert Doumar, a
Reagan appointee, scathingly demolished the government's
"evidence."

"A close inspection of the [Mobbs] declaration reveals that [it] never
claims that Hamdi was fighting for the Taliban, nor that he was a
member of the Taliban. . . . Is there anything in the Mobbs declaration
that says Hamdi ever fired a weapon?" (Emphasis added.)

In the January 9 New York Times, Elisa Massimino of the Lawyers
Committee for Human Rights exposed an earlier decision by a panel of
the Fourth Circuit to bow to Bush and to continue the stripping of
Hamdi's citizen's rights. "[The Fourth Circuit] seems to be saying that it
has no role whatsoever in overseeing the administration's conduct of
the war on terrorism . . . the beginning and end of which is left solely to
the president's discretion."

Now, the full Fourth Circuit bench has handed George W. Bush the
crown that George Washington disdained. What if the Supreme Court
agrees? Bush will be King George IV.

[Chris]

The Bush administration continues to fight, successfully, to prevent
public knowledge of what now-public intelligence information the
president was exposed to prior to 9/11. They claim this is a matter
of "national security." If anyone on this thread thinks they can
formulate a coherent argument for why the president's knowledge of
information already in the public domain needs to be kept secret in
the interests of the common defense, I would really, really like to
hear it.

Until then, I will continue to believe that this is just one more
cynical self-serving maneuver by a president facing reelection who
wants to protect himself from well-deserved political embarrassment
and condign public censure, and who wants to claim that he is really
just doing it for our own good.

Chris (USA)


http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030804&s=dcorn

The 9/11 Investigation
By David Corn
TheNation.com

Thursday 24 July 2003

The attacks of September 11 might have been prevented had the
US intelligence community been more competent. And the Bush
Administration is refusing to tell the public what intelligence the
President saw before 9/11 about the threat posed by Al Qaeda.

These are two findings contained in the long-awaited, 800-page
final report of the 9/11 joint inquiry conducted the Senate and House
intelligence committees, which was released on July 24. As is
traditional in Washington, the contents of the report were selectively
leaked before it was officially unveiled. And several news outfits
noted that the report contained "no smoking guns" and concluded, as
the
Associated Press put it, that "no evidence surfaced in the probe...to
show that the government could have prevented the attacks." Those
reports were wrong--and probably based on information parceled out
by sources looking to protect the government and the intelligence
community.

In the report's first finding, the committees note that the
intelligence community did not have information on the "time, place
and specific
nature" of the 9/11 attacks, but that it had "amassed a great deal of
valuable intelligence regarding Osama bin Laden and his terrorist
activities," and that this information could have been used to thwart
the assault. "Within the huge volume of intelligence reporting that
was
available prior to September 11," the report says, "there were various
threads and pieces of information that, at least in retrospect, are
both relevant and significant. The degree to which the [intelligence]
community was or was not able to build on that information to discern
the bigger picture successfully is a critical part of the context for
the September 11 attacks." One Congressional source familiar with the
report observes, "We couldn't say, 'Yes, the intelligence community
had all the specifics ahead of time.' But that is not the same as
saying this attack could not have been prevented."

The final report is an indictment of the intelligence
agencies--and, in part--of the administrations (Clinton and Bush II)
that oversaw them. It notes, "The intelligence community failed to
capitalize on both the individual and collective significance of
available information.... As
a result, the community missed opportunities to disrupt the September
11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at
least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other
investigative
work within the United States; and, finally, to generate a heightened
state
of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack. No one will ever
know what might have happened had more connections been drawn
between these disparate pieces of information.... The important point
is that the intelligence community, for a variety of reasons, did not
bring together and fully appreciate a range of information that could
have greatly enhanced its chances of uncovering and preventing
Osama bin Laden's plan to attack the United States on September 11,
2001."

The committees' report covers many missed--and
botched--opportunities. It shows that warnings and hints were either
ignored or neglected. Some of this has been covered in interim reports
released last year and in media accounts. But the final report does
contain new information and new details that only confirm an ugly
conclusion: A more effective and more vigilant bureaucracy would
have had a good chance of detecting portions of the 9/11 plot. "The
message is not to tell the intelligence community," said the source
familiar with the report, "that you didn't have the final announcement
of the details of the September 11 attacks and therefore you could not
prevent it. We have to have an intelligence community that is able to
connect dots and put the pieces together and investigate it
aggressively."

An example: The FBI had an active informant in San Diego who had
numerous contacts on 2000 with two of the 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf
al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. And he may also have had more
limited contact with a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour. In 2000, the CIA
had information that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar--who had already been
linked to terrorism--were or might be in the United States. Yet it had
not placed them on a watch list for suspected terrorists or shared
this information with the FBI. The FBI agent who handled the San Diego
informant told the committees that had he had access to the
intelligence information on al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, "it would have
made a huge difference." He would have "immediately opened" an
investigation and subjected them to a variety of surveillance. It can
never be known whether such an effort would have uncovered their
9/11 plans. "What is clear, however," the report says, "is that the
informant's contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on,
would have given the San Diego FBI field office perhaps the
intelligence community's best chance to unravel the September 11
plot. Given the CIA's failure to disseminate, in a timely manner, the
intelligence information on...al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, that chance,
unfortunately, never materialized." (The FBI's informant--who is not
named in the report--has denied any advance knowledge of 9/11,
according to the report, but the committees raise questions about his
credibility on this point, and the Bush Administration objected to the
joint inquiry's efforts to interview the informant.)

The CIA was not the only agency to screw up. So did the FBI. In
August 2001, the bureau did become aware that al-Mihdhar and
al-Hazmi were in the United States and tried to locate them. But the
San Diego field office never learned of the search. The FBI agent who
was handling the informant in San Diego told the committees, "I'm
sure we could have located them and we could have done it within a
few days." And the chiefs of the financial crime units at the FBI and
the Treasury Department told the committees that if their outfits had
been
asked to search for these two terrorists they would have been able to
find them through credit card and bank records. But no one made
such a request.

The final report notes that the CIA and other intelligence
agencies were never able to develop precise intelligence that would
have
allowed a US attack on bin Laden before 9/11. And it reveals that
there were even more warnings than previously indicated that Al Qaeda
was
aiming to strike at the United States directly. In an interim report
released last year, the committees provided a long list of
intelligence reports noting that Al Qaeda was eager to hit the United
States and
that terrorists were interested in using airliners as weapons. The new
material in the report includes the following:

§ A summer 1998 intelligence report that suggested bin Laden was
planning attacks in New York and Washington.

§ In September 1998 Tenet briefed members of Congress and told
them the FBI was following three or four bin Laden operatives in the
United States.

§ In the fall of 1998 intelligence reports noted that bin Laden
was considering a new attack, using biological toxins in food, water
or
ventilation systems for US embassies.

§ In December 1998 an intelligence source reported that an Al
Qaeda member was planning operations against US targets: "Plans
to hijack US aircraft proceeding well. Two individuals...had
successfully evaded checkpoints in a dry run at a NY airport."

§ In December 1999 the CIA's Counter terrorism Center concluded
that bin Laden wanted to inflict maximum casualties, cause massive
panic and score a psychological victory. To do so, it said, he might
seek to attack between five and fifteen targets on the millennium,
including several in the United States.

§ In April 2001 an intelligence report said that Al Qaeda was in
the throes of advanced preparation for a major attack, probably
against an
American or Israeli target.

§ In August 2001 the Counter terrorism Center concluded that for
every bin Laden operative stopped by US intelligence, an estimated
fifty operatives slip through, and that bin Laden was building up a
worldwide infrastructure that would allow him to launch multiple and
simultaneous attacks with little or no warning.

Despite these warnings, the intelligence bureaucracy did not act
as if bin Laden was a serious and pressing threat. A CIA briefing in
September 1999 noted that its unit focusing on bin Laden could not
get the funding it needed. In 2000 Richard Clarke, the national
coordinator for counter terrorism, visited several FBI field offices
and asked what they were doing about Al Qaeda. He told the committees,
"I got sort of blank looks of 'what is al Qaeda?" Lieut. Gen. Michael
Hayden, director of the National Security Agency, said that in 2001 he
knew that the NSA had to improve its coverage of Al Qaeda but that he
was unable to obtain intelligence-community support and resources
for that effort.

According to the report, an FBI budget official said that counter
terrorism was not a priority for Attorney General John Ashcroft prior
to
9/11, and the bureau faced pressure to cut its counter terrorism
program to satisfy Ashcroft's other priorities. (The report did not
state
what those other priorities were.) In a particularly damning
criticism,
the report notes, "there was a dearth of creative, aggressive analysis
targeting bin Laden and a persistent inability to comprehend the
collective significance of individual pieces of intelligence."

One crucial matter is missing from the report: how the White
House
responded to the intelligence on the Al Qaeda threat. That is because
the Administration will not allow the committees to say what
information reached Bush. The Administration argued, according to a
Congressional source, that to declassify "any description of the
president's knowledge" of intelligence reports--even when the content
of those reports have been declassified--would be a risk to national
security. It is difficult to see the danger to the nation that would
come
from the White House acknowledging whether Bush received any of
the information listed above or the other intelligence previously
described by the committees. (The latter would include a July 2001
report that said bin Laden was looking to pull off a "spectacular"
attack
against the United States or US interests designed to inflict "mass
casualties." It added, "Attack preparations have been made. Attack
will
occur with little or no warning. They are waiting us out, looking for
a
vulnerability.")

It is unusual--if not absurd--for an administration to claim that
the
state of presidential knowledge is top-secret when the material in
question has been made public. But that's what Bush officials have
done. Consequently, the public does not know whether these
warnings made it to Bush and whether he responded.

The White House also refused to release to the committees the
contents of an August 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief (PDB) that
contained information on bin Laden. In May 2002 National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed this PDB only included information
about bin Laden's methods of operation from a historical perspective
and contained no specific warnings. But the joint inquiry appears to
have managed to find a source in the intelligence community who
informed it that "a closely held intelligence report" for "senior
government officials" in August 2001 (read: the PDB prepared for
Bush) said that bin Laden was seeking to conduct attacks within the
United States, that Al Qaeda maintained a support structure here and
that information obtained in May 2001 indicated that a group of bin
Laden supporters were planning attacks in the United States with
explosives. This is quite different from Rice's characterization of
the
PDB. Did she mislead the public about it? And presuming that this
"closely held intelligence report" was indeed the PDB, the obvious
question is, how did Bush react? But through its use--or abuse--of the
classification process, the Administration has prevented such
questions from inconveniencing the White House.

The committees tried to gain access to National Security Council
documents that, the report says, "would have been helpful in
determining why certain options and program were or were not
pursued." But, it notes, "access to most information that involved
NSC-level discussions were blocked...by the White House." Bush has
said, "We must uncover every detail and learn every lesson of
September the 11th." Just not those details about him and his
National Security Council.

One big chunk of the report that the Administration refused to
declassify concerns foreign support for the 9/11 hijackers. Of these
twenty-seven pages, all but one and a half have been redacted. The
prevailing assumption among the journalists covering the
committees--and it is well founded--is that most of the missing
material concerns Saudi Arabia and the possibility that the hijackers
received financial support from there. Is the Bush Administration
treading too softly on a sensitive--and explosive--subject? "Neither
CIA
nor FBI officials," the report says, "were able to address
definitively the
extent of [foreign] support for the hijackers globally or within the
United
States or the extent to which such support, if it exists, is knowing
or
inadvertent in nature. Only recently, and at least in part due to the
joint
inquiry's focus on this issue, did the FBI and CIA strengthen their
efforts to address these issues.... [T]his gap in US intelligence
coverage is unacceptable." At one point in the final report, the
committees reveal that a July 2002 CIA cable included a CIA officer's
concerns that persons associated with a foreign government may
have provided financial assistance to the hijackers. "Those
indications
addressed in greater detail elsewhere in this report obviously raise
issues with serious national implications," the report notes. But
these
"indications" are not addressed elsewhere in the report. The
Administration would not declassify the material.

The report does include a list of quotes from unnamed US
officials
each of whom says that Saudi Arabia has been reluctant to cooperate
with the United States on matters related to bin Laden. "In May 2001,"
according to the report, "the US government became aware that an
individual in Saudi Arabia was in contact with a senior al Qaeda
operative and was most likely aware of an upcoming operation." The
following sentences--which likely cover how the United States
responded to this intelligence and what the Saudis did or did not
do--is deleted from the report, thanks to the Bush Administration.

It's a pity that the committees were, on a few matters, rolled by
the
White House, and that Bush has gotten away with concealing from the
public what he knew and when, and what he did (or did not do) about
a serious threat to the nation. But for seven months, the joint
inquiry
has been engaged in trench warfare with the Administration over the
declassification of this report. It is a credit to the joint inquiry
and its
staff director, Eleanor Hill, that the committees squeezed as much out
of the Administration as they did. The joint inquiry has done far
better
in this regard than the average Congressional intelligence committee
investigation.

The report is a good start in establishing the historical record.
It
reads at times like tragedy, at other times almost as farce. The signs
were there. Few paid attention. Two, if not more, of the hijackers
were
within reach of US law enforcement, but nobody saw that. Five days
after the attacks, Bush said, "No one could have conceivably imagined
suicide bombers burrowing into our society." And in May 2002, Rice
said, "I don't think anyone could have predicted these people would
take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center." Actually,
the
report has proof that the attacks of 9/11 were foreseen. Not in terms
of
date and time. But intelligence reporting indicated and terrorism
experts warned that Al Qaeda was interested in mounting precisely
these types of attacks. Yet the US government--the Bush II and Clinton
administrations--did not prepare adequately. The attacks were far less
outside the box than Bush and his aides have suggested. Thwarting
them was within the realm of possibility.

The Administration has yet to acknowledge that--let alone reveal
how--Bush responded to the intelligence he saw. The joint inquiry's
work provides a solid foundation for the 9/11 independent
commission, which is now conducting its own inquiry. Perhaps that
endeavor will be able to learn even more and address the questions
the Bush Administration did not allow the committees to answer.

[Chris]

Note that the Saudi "Prince Bandar" in this article is the very same
Prince Bandar who conspired in the mid 80's with then-CIA director,
William Casey, to perpetrate the deadly March 8, 1985 car bombing
attack in front of a mosque in Beirut, which killed 80 innocent people
and injured hundreds.

Chris (USA)


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/26/national/26SAUD.html

Classified Section of Sept. 11 Report Faults Saudi Rulers
By David Johnston
New York Times

Saturday 26 July 2003

WASHINGTON, July 25 - Senior officials of Saudi Arabia have
funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to charitable groups and
other
organizations that may have helped finance the September 2001 attacks,
a
still-classified section of a Congressional report on the hijackings
says, according to people who have read it.

The 28-page section of the report was deleted from the nearly
900-page declassified version released on Thursday by a joint
committee of the
House and Senate intelligence committees. The chapter focuses on the
role
foreign governments played in the hijackings, but centers almost
entirely on
Saudi Arabia, the people who saw the section said.

The Bush administration's refusal to allow the committee to
disclose the contents of the chapter has stirred resentment in
Congress, where some lawmakers have said the administration's desire
to protect the ruling
Saudi family had prevented the American public from learning crucial
facts
about the attacks. The report has been denounced by the Saudi
ambassador to
the United States, and some American officials questioned whether the
committee had made a conclusive case linking Saudi funding to the
hijackings.

The public report concluded that the F.B.I. and C.I.A. had known
for years that Al Qaeda sought to strike inside the United States, but
focused
their attention on the possibility of attacks overseas.

The declassified section of the report discloses the testimony of
several unidentified officials who criticized the Saudi government for
being
uncooperative in terrorism investigations, but makes no reference to
Riyadh's financing of groups that supported terror.

Some people who have read the classified chapter said it
represented a searing indictment of how Saudi Arabia's ruling elite
have, under the guise of support for Islamic charities, distributed
millions of dollars to
terrorists through an informal network of Saudi nationals, including
some in the
United States.

But other officials said the stricken chapter retraces Saudi
Arabia's well-documented support for Islamic charitable groups and
said the
report asserts without convincing evidence that Saudi officials knew
that
recipient groups used the money to finance terror.

The public version of the report identified Omar al-Bayoumi, a
Saudi student who befriended and helped finance two Saudi men who
later
turned out to be hijackers.

Mr. Bayoumi helped pay the expenses for the men, Khalid Almidhar
and Nawaq Alhazmi. Mr. Bayoumi, the report said, "had access to
seemingly
unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia." The report said Mr. Bayoumi was
employed by the Saudi civil aviation authority and left open his
motivations for supporting the two men.

The Saudi ambassador to the United States has angrily denied that
his country had failed to cooperate with the F.B.I. and C.I.A. in
fighting
terrorism and dismissed accusations that it helped finance two of the
hijackers
as "outrageous."

Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, said in a
statement after the report was released on Thursday that his country
"has been one of the most active partners in the war on terrorism, as
the president and
other administration officials have repeatedly and publicly attested."

Prince Bandar dismissed the report's assertions about Saudi
involvement in the hijackings.

"The idea that the Saudi government funded, organized or even
knew about Sept. 11 is malicious and blatantly false," Prince Bandar
said.
"There is something wrong with the basic logic of those who spread
these
spurious charges. Al Qaeda is a cult that is seeking to destroy Saudi
Arabia as
well as the United States. By what logic would we support a cult that
is
trying to kill us?"

He added: "In a 900-page report, 28 blanked-out pages are being
used by some to malign our country and our people. Rumors, innuendos
and
untruths have become, when it comes to the kingdom, the order of the
day."

Asked to comment on the report today, a Saudi Embassy
representative said Prince Bandar was out of town and could not be
reached.

Today, a senior Democratic senator wrote to President Bush asking
for the White House to demand that the Saudis turn over Mr. Bayoumi,
who is
believed to be residing in the kingdom.

"The link between al-Bayoumi and the hijackers is the best
evidence yet that part of official Saudi Arabia might have been
involved in the
attacks," said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York. "If the Saudi
royal family is as committed to fighting terrorism as it claims, it
will turn this guy
over to U.S. officials immediately so that we can finally get to the
bottom of his role in the attacks and his links to Al Qaeda."

Behind the immediate issue of whether Saudi Arabia played any
role in terrorism are a complex web of political, military and
economic
connections between the two countries. Successive Republican and
Democratic
administrations have aggressively sought to maintain the relationship
with a huge producer of oil and an ally in the Arab world.

One section of the report took issue with Louis J. Freeh, the
former F.B.I. director, who testified to the joint committee that the
bureau "was able to forge an effective working relationship with the
Saudi police and
Interior Ministry."

The report quoted several senior government officials, who were
not identified, expressing contradictory views. One government
official
told the panel "that he believed the U.S. government's hope of
eventually
obtaining Saudi cooperation was unrealistic because Saudi assistance
to the U.S.
is contrary to Saudi national interests."

Another official said: "For the most part it was a very troubled
relationship where the Saudis were not providing us quickly or very
vigorously with response to it. Sometimes they did, many times they
didn't. It was just very slow in coming."

[Chris]

(TimePixDC) wrote:
> >Subject: Re: [OT] What Is "Terrorism?"
> >From: (Chris)
> >Date: Fri, Jul 25, 2003 8:47 PM
> >This is what US-"liberated" Iraq looks like nowadays: people being
> >imprisoned without trial and held incommunicado indefinitely in
> >appalling conditions.
>
> Heck. That's what the United States looks like under the Bush League.

Good point, TimePix. At least two US citizens are being held
incommunicado without being charged with a crime, without judicial
oversight, without visitors or even the ability to speak with their
lawyers. It is questionable if either of these Americans even
realizes they have lawyers. This is blatantly illegal, of course, and
typifies the contempt the Bush administration has for domestic civil
liberties, as well as for international law. Legal challenges to
these detentions will eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court, where
the nine justices will hopefully have the common decency to declare
the detentions illegal. But the Bush administration's plan appears to
be to have "P.A.T.R.I.O.T. II" enacted into law by them.

Under "P.A.T.R.I.O.T. II," the government can arbitrarily strip any
American of their citizenship by declaring them a "suspected
terrorist." Once they have been stripped of their citizenship, they
can be treated just like the hundreds of detainees in Guantanamo Bay
and "Camp Cropper" with no habeus corpus rights, no lawyer-client
confidentiality (if they are even allowed lawyers in the first place)
pending an eventual kangaroo court "military tribunal" in which they
are presumed guilty unless they can somehow prove themselves innocent
(a sometimes impossible task even for the genuinely innocent, which is
partly why the Anglo-American tradition of jurisprudence normally
gives the prosecution rather than the defence the burden of proof).
All
decisions by the military tribunal are final and may not be appealed,
with death sentences to be carried out immediately.

The civil liberties which Americans have traditionally enjoyed are
one of the clearest examples of the genuinely good aspects of America,
a country whose history is sadly tainted by genocide, slavery and the
arrogance of empire. How bitterly ironic that the forces on the
domestic political stage most committed to trashing these traditional
civil liberties in all but name are wrapping themselves in the stars
and stripes and using "patriotism" as their cover; as if shredding the
Bill of Rights were a patriotic act and anyone who challenges this
must be "disloyal" and a "terrorist sympathizer."

Of course, those Americans who loudly praise whatever international
military aggression their country is currently pursuing need never
need
to worry about *their*
civil liberties coming under attack. *They* will remain free to sing
God Bless America in the key of their choice, and to engage in lively
debate among themselves about how to best carry out the wise, glorious
and correct proclamations of our Great Leader and Party. This is very
much the same kind of so-called "freedom of speech" which was
guaranteed in the Chinese Constitution and which prevailed in China
under Mao, where civil liberties belonged to everyone except "enemies
of the people." "Enemies of the people," of course, meant anyone who
deviated from the Party Line. Under Mao, Chinese citizens were
imprisoned for years on end without trial, without formal charges,
without being able to confront their accusers, without habeus corpus
rights, etc., simply because the government declared them suspected
"enemies of the people" without the government needing to meet any
minimum standard of evidence in doing so. Sound familiar? It should.


Chris (USA), who recently read "Life and Death in Shanghai," (New
York:
Grove Press, 1987) Nien Cheng's account of her six year imprisonment
without charges during Mao's "cultural revolution," and thinks that
any American who can read it and not get a nervous chill must not be
paying attention to what is going on in their own country as we speak.

[R. Steve Walz]

Chris wrote:
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-rights-patriot.html
>
> ACLU Challenges U.S. Anti-Terrorism Law
> Reuters
>
> Wednesday 30 July 2003
>
> DETROIT - The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit
> against the federal government on Wednesday aimed at
> curbing the vastly expanded spy powers won under the
> anti-terrorism law passed soon after the Sept. 11 attacks
[]
> Mary Rose Oakar, head of the Arab-American
> Anti-Discrimination Committee that is one of the six plaintiffs
> in the ACLU case, noted that Arabs and Muslim-Americans
> have been the primary target of the FBI's counter-terror
> measures after Sept. 11.
---------------------------------
To preserve freedom, Islam must be totally destroyed world-wide
and its supporters burned in a big hole, preferably radioactive.
Steve

[R. Steve Walz]

Chris wrote:
>
> When Saddam's regime didn't like what al-Jazeera reported, it shut
> them down and expelled them. When the USA doesn't like what
> al-Jazeera reports, it bombs them and kills their reporters. Who is
> the bigger "thug" in this case?
>
> Chris (USA)
------------
Simple, Islam is wrong, and secular libertinism is right.
Kill for Islam and you're evil, kill for the truth and you're good.
Steve

[Byte Me]

"R. Steve Walz" > put fingertips to keyboard and tap-
tap-tapped out the following communication:

> Thomas Edward Lawrence is dead, and good ****ing riddance.
> Now we simply have to rid the world of Islam, and all the
> other vicious superstitious sheep-****er religions, like
> Baptists and Catholics and Jews.
> Steve
>
>

Not to mention racistsa and bigots.

Oh, BTW... PLONK!

--
################################################## ##############
'I told the priest, "don't count on any second coming...
God got His ass kicked the first time He came down here slumming"'
-- Concrete Blonde
################################################## ##############

[Byte Me]

"the bogeyman" > put fingertips to
keyboard and tap-tap-tapped out the following communication:

> Lard Valve = crypto-fascist
>

More like Blown Valve = poor excuse for a human being.

--
################################################## ##############
'I told the priest, "don't count on any second coming...
God got His ass kicked the first time He came down here slumming"'
-- Concrete Blonde
################################################## ##############