DysBUSHtopia

RFK Jr. Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

2006-06-03T11:52:00.000-07:00

Thanks to SB for passing this along. --RB
URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

Rollingstone.com

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
Republicans prevented more than 350,000 voters in Ohio from casting ballots or having their votes counted -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.
BY ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

The complete article, with Web-only citations, follows. Talk about it in our National Affairs blog, or see exclusive documents, sources, charts and commentary.

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of fraud as ''conspiracy theories,''(1) and The New York Times declared that ''there is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale.''(2)

But despite the media blackout, indications continued to emerge that something deeply troubling had taken place in 2004. Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad(3) never received their ballots -- or received them too late to vote(4) -- after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations.(5) A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states,(6) was discovered shredding Democratic registrations.(7) In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes,(8) malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots.(9) Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment -- roughly one for every 100 cast.(10)

The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.(11)

Any election, of course, will have anomalies. America's voting system is a messy patchwork of polling rules run mostly by county and city officials. ''We didn't have one election for president in 2004,'' says Robert Pastor, who directs the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University. ''We didn't have fifty elections. We actually had 13,000 elections run by 13,000 independent, quasi-sovereign counties and municipalities.''

But what is most anomalous about the irregularities in 2004 was their decidedly partisan bent: Almost without exception they hurt John Kerry and benefited George Bush. After carefully examining the evidence, I've become convinced that the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004. Across the country, Republican election officials and party stalwarts employed a wide range of illegal and unethical tactics to fix the election. A review of the available data reveals that in Ohio alone, at least 357,000 voters, the overwhelming majority of them Democratic, were prevented from casting ballots or did not have their votes counted in 2004(12) -- more than enough to shift the results of an election decided by 118,601 votes.(13) (See Ohio's Missing Votes) In what may be the single most astounding fact from the election, one in every four Ohio citizens who registered to vote in 2004 showed up at the polls only to discover that they were not listed on the rolls, thanks to GOP efforts to stem the unprecedented flood of Democrats eager to cast ballots.(14) And that doesn?t even take into account the troubling evidence of outright fraud, which indicates that upwards of 80,000 votes for Kerry were counted instead for Bush. That alone is a swing of more than 160,000 votes -- enough to have put John Kerry in the White House.(15)

''It was terrible,'' says Sen. Christopher Dodd, who helped craft reforms in 2002 that were supposed to prevent such electoral abuses. ''People waiting in line for twelve hours to cast their ballots, people not being allowed to vote because they were in the wrong precinct -- it was an outrage. In Ohio, you had a secretary of state who was determined to guarantee a Republican outcome. I'm terribly disheartened.''

Indeed, the extent of the GOP's effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ''Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,'' Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ''You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.''

I. The Exit Polls
The first indication that something was gravely amiss on November 2nd, 2004, was the inexplicable discrepancies between exit polls and actual vote counts. Polls in thirty states weren't just off the mark -- they deviated to an extent that cannot be accounted for by their margin of error. In all but four states, the discrepancy favored President Bush.(16)

Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable. Unlike pre-election polls, in which voters are asked to predict their own behavior at some point in the future, exit polls ask voters leaving the voting booth to report an action they just executed. The results are exquisitely accurate: Exit polls in Germany, for example, have never missed the mark by more than three-tenths of one percent.(17) ''Exit polls are almost never wrong,'' Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ''so reliable,'' he added, ''that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.''(18) In 2003, vote tampering revealed by exit polling in the Republic of Georgia forced Eduard Shevardnadze to step down.(19) And in November 2004, exit polling in the Ukraine -- paid for by the Bush administration -- exposed election fraud that denied Viktor Yushchenko the presidency.(20)

But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey treated its very existence as an embarrassment. Instead of treating the discrepancies as a story meriting investigation, the networks scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ''corrected'' numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count. Rather than finding fault with the election results, the mainstream media preferred to dismiss the polls as flawed.(21)

''The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,'' says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ''They were really screwed up -- the old models just don't work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.''

In fact, the exit poll created for the 2004 election was designed to be the most reliable voter survey in history. The six news organizations -- running the ideological gamut from CBS to Fox News -- retained Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International,(22) whose principal, Warren Mitofsky, pioneered the exit poll for CBS in 1967(23) and is widely credited with assuring the credibility of Mexico's elections in 1994.(24) For its nationwide poll, Edison/Mitofsky selected a random subsample of 12,219 voters(25) -- approximately six times larger than those normally used in national polls(26) -- driving the margin of error down to approximately plus or minus one percent.(27)

On the evening of the vote, reporters at each of the major networks were briefed by pollsters at 7:54 p.m. Kerry, they were informed, had an insurmountable lead and would win by a rout: at least 309 electoral votes to Bush's 174, with fifty-five too close to call.(28) In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair went to bed contemplating his relationship with President-elect Kerry.(29)

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina.(30) Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000.(31) ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''(32)

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.(33)

According to Steven F. Freeman, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in research methodology, the odds against all three of those shifts occurring in concert are one in 660,000. ''As much as we can say in sound science that something is impossible,'' he says, ''it is impossible that the discrepancies between predicted and actual vote count in the three critical battleground states of the 2004 election could have been due to chance or random error.'' (See The Tale of the Exit Polls)

Puzzled by the discrepancies, Freeman laboriously examined the raw polling data released by Edison/Mitofsky in January 2005. ''I'm not even political -- I despise the Democrats,'' he says. ''I'm a survey expert. I got into this because I was mystified about how the exit polls could have been so wrong.'' In his forthcoming book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count, Freeman lays out a statistical analysis of the polls that is deeply troubling.

In its official postmortem report issued two months after the election, Edison/Mitofsky was unable to identify any flaw in its methodology -- so the pollsters, in essence, invented one for the electorate. According to Mitofsky, Bush partisans were simply disinclined to talk to exit pollsters on November 2nd(34) -- displaying a heretofore unknown and undocumented aversion that skewed the polls in Kerry's favor by a margin of 6.5 percent nationwide.(35)

Industry peers didn't buy it. John Zogby, one of the nation's leading pollsters, told me that Mitofsky's ''reluctant responder'' hypothesis is ''preposterous.''(36) Even Mitofsky, in his official report, underscored the hollowness of his theory: ''It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters.''(37)

Now, thanks to careful examination of Mitofsky's own data by Freeman and a team of eight researchers, we can say conclusively that the theory is dead wrong. In fact it was Democrats, not Republicans, who were more disinclined to answer pollsters' questions on Election Day. In Bush strongholds, Freeman and the other researchers found that fifty-six percent of voters completed the exit survey -- compared to only fifty-three percent in Kerry strongholds.(38) ''The data presented to support the claim not only fails to substantiate it,'' observes Freeman, ''but actually contradicts it.''

What's more, Freeman found, the greatest disparities between exit polls and the official vote count came in Republican strongholds. In precincts where Bush received at least eighty percent of the vote, the exit polls were off by an average of ten percent. By contrast, in precincts where Kerry dominated by eighty percent or more, the exit polls were accurate to within three tenths of one percent -- a pattern that suggests Republican election officials stuffed the ballot box in Bush country.(39)

''When you look at the numbers, there is a tremendous amount of data that supports the supposition of election fraud,'' concludes Freeman. ''The discrepancies are higher in battleground states, higher where there were Republican governors, higher in states with greater proportions of African-American communities and higher in states where there were the most Election Day complaints. All these are strong indicators of fraud -- and yet this supposition has been utterly ignored by the press and, oddly, by the Democratic Party.''

The evidence is especially strong in Ohio. In January, a team of mathematicians from the National Election Data Archive, a nonpartisan watchdog group, compared the state's exit polls against the certified vote count in each of the forty-nine precincts polled by Edison/Mitofsky. In twenty-two of those precincts -- nearly half of those polled -- they discovered results that differed widely from the official tally. Once again -- against all odds -- the widespread discrepancies were stacked massively in Bush's favor: In only two of the suspect twenty-two precincts did the disparity benefit Kerry. The wildest discrepancy came from the precinct Mitofsky numbered ''27,'' in order to protect the anonymity of those surveyed. According to the exit poll, Kerry should have received sixty-seven percent of the vote in this precinct. Yet the certified tally gave him only thirty-eight percent. The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion.(40)

Such results, according to the archive, provide ''virtually irrefutable evidence of vote miscount.'' The discrepancies, the experts add, ''are consistent with the hypothesis that Kerry would have won Ohio's electoral votes if Ohio's official vote counts had accurately reflected voter intent.''(41) According to Ron Baiman, vice president of the archive and a public policy analyst at Loyola University in Chicago, ''No rigorous statistical explanation'' can explain the ''completely nonrandom'' disparities that almost uniformly benefited Bush. The final results, he adds, are ''completely consistent with election fraud -- specifically vote shifting.''

II. The Partisan Official
No state was more important in the 2004 election than Ohio. The state has been key to every Republican presidential victory since Abraham Lincoln's, and both parties overwhelmed the state with television ads, field organizers and volunteers in an effort to register new voters and energize old ones. Bush and Kerry traveled to Ohio a total of forty-nine times during the campaign -- more than to any other state.(42)

But in the battle for Ohio, Republicans had a distinct advantage: The man in charge of the counting was Kenneth Blackwell, the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee.(43) As Ohio's secretary of state, Blackwell had broad powers to interpret and implement state and federal election laws -- setting standards for everything from the processing of voter registration to the conduct of official recounts.(44) And as Bush's re-election chair in Ohio, he had a powerful motivation to rig the rules for his candidate. Blackwell, in fact, served as the ''principal electoral system adviser'' for Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida,(45) where he witnessed firsthand the success of his counterpart Katherine Harris, the Florida secretary of state who co-chaired Bush's campaign there.(46)

Blackwell -- now the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio(47) -- is well-known in the state as a fierce partisan eager to rise in the GOP. An outspoken leader of Ohio's right-wing fundamentalists, he opposes abortion even in cases of rape(48) and was the chief cheerleader for the anti-gay-marriage amendment that Republicans employed to spark turnout in rural counties(49). He has openly denounced Kerry as ''an unapologetic liberal Democrat,''(50) and during the 2004 election he used his official powers to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of Ohio citizens in Democratic strongholds. In a ruling issued two weeks before the election, a federal judge rebuked Blackwell for seeking to ''accomplish the same result in Ohio in 2004 that occurred in Florida in 2000.''(51)

''The secretary of state is supposed to administer elections -- not throw them,'' says Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a Democrat from Cleveland who has dealt with Blackwell for years. ''The election in Ohio in 2004 stands out as an example of how, under color of law, a state election official can frustrate the exercise of the right to vote.''

The most extensive investigation of what happened in Ohio was conducted by Rep. John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.(52) Frustrated by his party's failure to follow up on the widespread evidence of voter intimidation and fraud, Conyers and the committee's minority staff held public hearings in Ohio, where they looked into more than 50,000 complaints from voters.(53) In January 2005, Conyers issued a detailed report that outlined ''massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio.'' The problems, the report concludes, were ''caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.''(54)

''Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake,'' Conyers told me. ''He saw his role as limiting the participation of Democratic voters. We had hearings in Columbus for two days. We could have stayed two weeks, the level of fury was so high. Thousands of people wanted to testify. Nothing like this had ever happened to them before.''

When ROLLING STONE confronted Blackwell about his overtly partisan attempts to subvert the election, he dismissed any such claim as ''silly on its face.'' Ohio, he insisted in a telephone interview, set a ''gold standard'' for electoral fairness. In fact, his campaign to subvert the will of the voters had begun long before Election Day. Instead of welcoming the avalanche of citizen involvement sparked by the campaign, Blackwell permitted election officials in Cleveland, Cincinnati and Toledo to conduct a massive purge of their voter rolls, summarily expunging the names of more than 300,000 voters who had failed to cast ballots in the previous two national elections.(55) In Cleveland, which went five-to-one for Kerry, nearly one in four voters were wiped from the rolls between 2000 and 2004.(56)

There were legitimate reasons to clean up voting lists: Many of the names undoubtedly belonged to people who had moved or died. But thousands more were duly registered voters who were deprived of their constitutional right to vote -- often without any notification -- simply because they had decided not to go to the polls in prior elections.(57) In Cleveland's precinct 6C, where more than half the voters on the rolls were deleted,(58) turnout was only 7.1 percent(59) -- the lowest in the state.

According to the Conyers report, improper purging ''likely disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters statewide.''(60) If only one in ten of the 300,000 purged voters showed up on Election Day -- a conservative estimate, according to election scholars -- that is 30,000 citizens who were unfairly denied the opportunity to cast ballots.

III. The Strike Force
In the months leading up to the election, Ohio was in the midst of the biggest registration drive in its history. Tens of thousands of volunteers and paid political operatives from both parties canvassed the state, racing to register new voters in advance of the October 4th deadline. To those on the ground, it was clear that Democrats were outpacing their Republican counterparts: A New York Times analysis before the election found that new registrations in traditional Democratic strongholds were up 250 percent, compared to only twenty-five percent in Republican-leaning counties.(61) ''The Democrats have been beating the pants off us in the air and on the ground,'' a GOP county official in Columbus confessed to The Washington Times.(62)

To stem the tide of new registrations, the Republican National Committee and the Ohio Republican Party attempted to knock tens of thousands of predominantly minority and urban voters off the rolls through illegal mailings known in electioneering jargon as ''caging.'' During the Eighties, after the GOP used such mailings to disenfranchise nearly 76,000 black voters in New Jersey and Louisiana, it was forced to sign two separate court orders agreeing to abstain from caging.(63) But during the summer of 2004, the GOP targeted minority voters in Ohio by zip code, sending registered letters to more than 200,000 newly registered voters(64) in sixty-five counties.(65) On October 22nd, a mere eleven days before the election, Ohio Republican Party Chairman Bob Bennett -- who also chairs the board of elections in Cuyahoga County -- sought to invalidate the registrations of 35,427 voters who had refused to sign for the letters or whose mail came back as undeliverable.(66) Almost half of the challenged voters were from Democratic strongholds in and around Cleveland.(67)

There were plenty of valid reasons that voters had failed to respond to the mailings: The list included people who couldn't sign for the letters because they were serving in the U.S. military, college students whose school and home addresses differed,(68) and more than 1,000 homeless people who had no permanent mailing address.(69) But the undeliverable mail, Bennett claimed, proved the new registrations were fraudulent.

By law, each voter was supposed to receive a hearing before being stricken from the rolls.(70) Instead, in the week before the election, kangaroo courts were rapidly set up across the state at Blackwell's direction that would inevitably disenfranchise thousands of voters at a time(71) -- a process that one Democratic election official in Toledo likened to an ''inquisition.''(72) Not that anyone was given a chance to actually show up and defend their right to vote: Notices to challenged voters were not only sent out impossibly late in the process, they were mailed to the very addresses that the Republicans contended were faulty.(73) Adding to the atmosphere of intimidation, sheriff's detectives in Sandusky County were dispatched to the homes of challenged voters to investigate the GOP's claims of fraud.(74)

Next page

--
For the continuation of this article which includes 208 footnotes, see:

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen

1) Manual Roig-Franzia and Dan Keating, ''Latest Conspiracy Theory -- Kerry Won -- Hits the Ether,'' The Washington Post, November 11, 2004.
2) The New York Times Editorial Desk, ''About Those Election Results,'' The New York Times, November 14, 2004.

3) United States Department of Defense, August 6, 2004.

4) Overseas Vote Foundation, ''2004 Post Election Survey Results,'' June 2005, page 11.

5) Jennifer Joan Lee, ''Pentagon Blocks Site for Voters Outside U.S.,'' International Herald Tribune, September 20, 2004.

6) Meg Landers, ''Librarian Bares Possible Voter Registration Dodge,'' Mail Tribune (Jackson County, OR), September 21, 2004.

7) Mark Brunswick and Pat Doyle, ''Voter Registration; 3 former workers: Firm paid pro-Bush bonuses; One said he was told his job was to bring back cards for GOP voters,'' Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN), October 27, 2004.

8) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President.

9) Ellen Theisen and Warren Stewart, Summary Report on New Mexico State Election Data, January 4, 2005, pg. 2

James W. Bronsan, ''In 2004, New Mexico Worst at Counting Votes,'' Scripps Howard News Service, December 22, 2004. 10) ''A Summary of the 2004 Election Day Survey; How We Voted: People, Ballots & Polling Places; A Report to the American People by the United States Election Assistance Commission'', September 2005, pg. 10.

11) Facts mentioned in this paragraph are subsequently cited throughout the story.

12) See ''Ohio's Missing Votes''

13) Federal Election Commission, Federal Elections 2004: Election Results for the U.S. President.

14) Democratic National Committee, Voting Rights Institute, ''Democracy at Risk: The 2004 Election in Ohio'', June 22, 2005. Page 5

15) See ''VIII. Rural Counties.''

16) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004'' prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofksy International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3

17) This refers to data for German national elections in 1994, 1998 and 2002, previously cited by Steven F. Freeman.

18) Dick Morris, ''Those Faulty Exit Polls Were Sabotage,'' The Hill, November 4, 2004.

19) Martin Plissner, ''Exit Polls to Protect the Vote,'' The New York Times, October 17, 2004.

20) Matt Kelley, ''U.S. Money has Helped Opposition in Ukraine,'' Associated Press, December 11, 2004.

Daniel Williams, ''Court Rejects Ukraine Vote; Justices Cite Massive Fraud in Runoff, Set New Election,'' The Washington Post, December 4, 2004.

21) Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, ''Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count,'' Seven Stories Press, July 2006, Page 102.

22) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 3.

23) Mitofsky International

24) Tim Golden, ''Election Near, Mexicans Question the Questioners,'' The New York Times, August 10, 1994.

25) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 59.

26) Jonathan D. Simon, J.D., and Ron P. Baiman, Ph.D., ''The 2004 Presidential Election: Who Won the Popular Vote? An Examination of the Comparative Validity of Exit Poll and Vote Count Data.'' FreePress.org, December 29, 2004, P. 9

27) Analysis by Steven F. Freeman.

28) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134

29) Jim Rutenberg, ''Report Says Problems Led to Skewing Survey Data,'' The New York Times, November 5, 2004.

30) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 134

31) Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies. U.S. Count Votes. Baiman R, et al. March 31, 2005. Page 3.

32) Notes From Campaign Trail, Fox News Network, Live Event, 8:00 p.m. EST, November 2, 2004.

33) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 101-102

34) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.

35) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 120.

36) Interview with John Zogby

37) Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004; prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP), January 19, 2005, Page 4.

38) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 128.

39) Freeman and Bleifuss, pg. 130.

40) ''The Gun is Smoking: 2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount,'' U.S. Count Votes, National Election Data Archive, January 23, 2006.

41) ''The Gun is Smoking,'' pg. 16.

42) The Washington Post, ''Charting the Campaign: Top Five Most Visited States,'' November 2, 2004.

43) John McCarthy, ''Nearly a Month Later, Ohio Fight Goes On,'' Associated Press Online, November 30, 2004.

44) Ohio Revised Code, 3501.04, Chief Election Officer''

45) Joe Hallett, ''Blackwell Joins GOP's Spin Team,'' The Columbus Dispatch, November 30, 2004.

46) Gary Fineout, ''Records Indicate Harris on Defense,'' Ledger (Lakeland, Florida), November 18, 2000.

47) http://www.kenblackwell.com/

48) Joe Hallett, ''Governor; Aggressive First Round Culminates Tuesday,'' Columbus Dispatch, April 30, 2006.

49) Sandy Theis, ''Blackwell Accused of Breaking Law by Pushing Same-Sex Marriage Ban,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 29, 2004.

50) Raw Story, ''Republican Ohio Secretary of State Boasts About Delivering Ohio to Bush.''

51) In the United States District Court For the Northern District of Ohio Northern Division, The Sandusky County Democratic Party et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case No. 3:04CV7582, Page 8.

52) Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio, Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff (Rep. John Conyers, Jr.), January 5, 2005.

53) Preserving Democracy, pg. 8.

54) Preserving Democracy, pg. 4.

55) The board of elections in Cuyahoga, Franklin and Hamilton counties.

56) Analysis by Richard Hayes Phillips, a voting rights advocate.

57) Fritz Wenzel, ''Purging of Rolls, Confusion Anger Voters; 41% of Nov. 2 Provisional Ballots Axed in Lucas County,'' Toledo Blade, January 9, 2005.

58) Analysis by Hayes Phillips.

59) Cuyahoga County Board of Elections

60) Preserving Democracy, pg. 6.

61) Ford Fessenden, ''A Big Increase of New Voters in Swing States,'' The New York Times, September 26, 2004.

62) Ralph Z. Hallow, ''Republicans Go 'Under the Radar' in Rural Ohio,'' The Washington Times, October 28, 2004.

63) Jo Becker, ''GOP Challenging Voter Registrations,'' The Washington Post, October 29, 2004.

64) Janet Babin, ''Voter Registrations Challenged in Ohio,'' NPR, All Things Considered, October 28, 2004.

65) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 2.

66) Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.

67) Daniel Tokaji, ''Early Returns on Election Reform,'' George Washington Law Review, Vol. 74, 2005, page 1235

68) Sandy Theis, ''Fraud-Busters Busted; GOP's Blanket Challenge Backfires in a Big Way,'' Plain Dealer, October 31, 2004.

69) Andrew Welsh-Huggins, ''Out of Country, Off Beaten Path; Reason for Voting Challenges Vary,'' Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH), October 27, 2004.

70) Ohio Revised Code; 3505.19

71) Directive No. 2004-44 from J. Kenneth Blackwell, Ohio Sec'y of State, to All County Boards of Elections Members, Directors, and Deputy Directors 1 (Oct. 26, 2004).

72) Fritz Wenzel, ''Challenges Filed Against 931 Lucas County Voters,'' Toledo Blade, October 27, 2004.

73) In the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio, Western Division, Amy Miller et al. v. J. Kenneth Blackwell, Case no. C-1-04-735, Page 4.

74) LaRaye Brown, ''Elections Board Plans Hearing For Challenges,'' The News Messenger, October 26, 2004.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.

Posted Jun 01, 2006 5:02 PM

Liz Cheney: Dad's Enforcer

2006-06-01T19:48:00.000-07:00

Here's another in Dreyfuss' extraordinary exposes of Cheney's control of government. His daughter Liz, turns out to inherit her father's imperiousness, not to mention his extreme radical ideology. In an unprecedented promotion for someone with no Middle East experience, she gets to be the top gatekeeper at State's Middle East desk, riding roughshod even over ambassadors -- with a very occasional comeuppance as detailed below.As Dreyfuss documents, it's the Cheneys who are leading the charge for regime change in Syria and Iran. --RB

The Commissar’s in Town
T@P Very little happens at State regarding the Middle East without the knowledge and approval of Cheney -- not Dick, but Liz, his powerful, secretive daughter.
http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=11540
By Robert Dreyfuss
Issue Date: 06.06.06

At the very heart of U.S. Middle East policy, from the war in Iraq to pressure for regime change in Iran and Syria to the spread of free-market democracy in the region, sits the 39-year-old daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney. Elizabeth “Liz” Cheney, appointed to her post in February 2005, has a tongue-twisting title: principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs and coordinator for broader Middle East and North Africa initiatives. By all accounts, it is an enormously powerful post, and one for which she is uniquely unqualified.

During the past 15 months, Elizabeth Cheney has met with and bolstered a gaggle of Syrian exiles, often in tandem with John Hannah and David Wurmser, top officials in the Office of the Vice President (OVP); has pressed hard for money to accelerate the administration’s ever more overt campaign for forced regime change in both Damascus and Teheran; and has overseen an increasingly discredited push for American-inspired democratic reform from Morocco to Iran. With the unspoken support of her father, Cheney has kept a hawk’s eye on Iraq policy within the department, intimidating opponents of the neoconservative axis within the administration. And, less visibly, according to former officials who’ve worked with her, she has made her influence felt in choosing officials, selecting (or blocking) the appointment of ambassadors and other foreign service officers, and weighing in on other bureaucratic battles at the department.

Now, according to the Financial Times of London, Cheney is coordinating the work of a new entity called the Iran-Syria Operations Group. The unit was established “to plot a more aggressive democracy promotion strategy for those two ‘rogue’ states,” reported the Times. In February, the State Department announced that Cheney would oversee a $5 million program to “accelerate the work of reformers in Syria,” providing grants of up to $1 million each to Syrian dissidents. And in the current fiscal year, she will oversee a similar, $7 million regime-change grant program for Iran, though funding for that effort is expected to grow to at least $85 million soon, to include both a propaganda program and support to Iranian opposition groups.

“She came in knowing very little about the Middle East,” says Marina S. Ottaway, senior associate and co-director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has worked with Liz Cheney on democratic reform issues. “She had a mandate to do democracy promotion, but she had very little familiarity with the subject. … They deliberately picked a person who was not a Middle East specialist, so that the conventional wisdom, well, let me rephrase, so that real, actual knowledge of the issues in the region wouldn’t interfere with policy.”

Liz Cheney catapulted into her current job after a rather undistinguished career that leapfrogged from public to private life and back again. In her early 20s, she did a stint at the State Department while her father was secretary of defense in the first Bush administration, and then headed to law school at the University of Chicago and worked for Armitage Associates, a firm run by Richard Armitage. As an attorney, she worked for the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank, and served briefly as a U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) officer in Hungary and Poland. Her Middle East experience was, well, limited.

Asked about Liz’s familiarity with the Middle East, a former staffer at the Middle East Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank, says that she dabbled in the Institute’s Arabic language classes. “And she’d come to our annual conference,” she said. That’s it.

That was, however, apparently enough to get her named deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) in 2002.

* * *

In an administration in which policy toward Iraq and the Middle East was mostly guided by know-nothings and the inexperienced, perhaps it isn’t surprising that Liz Cheney got herself named to a top position at Near Eastern Affairs. How, exactly, she ended up at NEA in the first place is something of a mystery, although no one interviewed doubted that it was at the behest of the vice president. One former deputy assistant secretary at NEA said that the bureau was offered the choice of either Liz Cheney or Danielle Pletka, a neoconservative hard-liner who is the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Pletka, a sharp-elbowed insider who helped write the Iraq Liberation Act in the 1990s, was reportedly seen by Secretary of State Colin Powell and NEA as the greater of two evils, and so Cheney got the job.

During the preparations for the Iraq War, Cheney had a back seat at NEA, with a portfolio covering Middle East economic issues, including oil. However, according to insiders, her real importance was to serve as an ace-in-the-hole at the State Department for the vice president’s office. Her presence had a sobering effect on many of the department’s Arabists, most of whom were known as opponents of the war and were considered suspect by neoconservatives. “All during that year, you had the vice president’s daughter sitting there at State Department meetings,” says Chas Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Says another former U.S. ambassador to several key Middle East countries otherwise known for his tough-minded ability to stand up to Arab strongmen: “I would find it confining, if not intimidating.”

In 2003, she left the State Department to take a role in the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign and to give birth to her fourth child. (Her husband is Philip Perry, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security.) But after the election, in 2005, she was back -- this time with an important, and telling, promotion to the far more senior post of principal deputy assistant secretary, making her the No. 2 official on Middle East policy. Known by its acronym, PDAS (pronounced “pee-dass”), it is a bureaucratic post known for its power inside NEA. It was an appointment that certainly got the attention of the State Department’s Middle East hands.

“There has always been a political appointee in every bureau at State,” says Ambassador Philip Wilcox, a former assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. But usually the political appointee, who serves as a sort of commissar, would be placed in a low rank within NEA, he says. “The idea that the pdas would be that political appointee is just unprecedented, since she serves as the alter ego of the assistant secretary.”

Wayne White, who served as deputy director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and who headed that unit’s Iraq team during the war, left the State Department in 2005. “The thing we all said among us, in chit chat, when she moved up to be PDAS after being the deputy assistant secretary, was, ‘Ah, now we see the plan,’” he says. “First, she gets her training wheels as deputy assistant secretary … where she’d get softer assignments, sort of training, which happens to people in that position who don’t have a Middle East background, and she doesn’t -- and then boom! right up to PDAS … She is in a position to stop anything from going forward -- as in the form of a memo, a recommendation -- that she pretty much wants.”

In her job as PDAS, Cheney is responsible for nearly all of the management and administration of the bureau, says White. “In one way, the PDAS is like Stalin in the early 1920s communist party, controlling personnel, able to promote, not promote, put people in key positions. This is an extremely powerful position.”

David Welch, the assistant secretary of state for NEA, is nominally Liz Cheney’s boss. But her connection to her father, plus her pipelines directly up to more senior State Department officials such as Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, make it easy for her to eclipse Welch. (Like Armitage, who also served as a top State Department official for George W. Bush, Zoellick is a signatory to the statements of the Project for a New American Century in the 1990s, which charted the administration’s bellicose course.) “David Welch is in an impossible position on anything she takes an interest in,” says a former top NEA official. “And she takes an interest in the big issues -- Iraq, Iran, and so on. They have to be very careful, if they want to do anything that protects the national interest, because it has to coincide with what Liz Cheney thinks is in the national interest.” One of the few reporters in Washington to look into Liz Cheney’s role at the State Department, Timothy Phelps of Long Island’s Newsday, reported in April that she operates what is essentially a “shadow Middle East policy” against the more mainstream policy promoted by Welch, typical of the neoconservative versus realist divisions that have plagued the Bush administration since 2001.

Cheney has not shied away from throwing her weight around. During her frequent trips to the Middle East, she often operates independently of the department and of the U.S. ambassador in whatever country she is visiting. She has been known to insist on seeing a head of state without inviting the American ambassador to accompany her, in violation of protocol, often threatening the ambassador with the power of her contacts. On at least one occasion, however, an ambassador called her bluff. “Liz Cheney comes out to this country, and she tells the ambassador -- and she doesn’t outrank him -- she tells the ambassador, ‘You’re not going in the meeting with me,’” recalls Larry Wilkerson, who served as Colin Powell’s assistant during his tenure as secretary of state. “And he says, ‘I’m sorry, I’m going in the meeting with you. You’re not going into a meeting with the head of state without me.’ And she says, ‘Nope -- would you like a telephone call?’” In this case, says Wilkerson, the department’s bosses backed up their ambassador, who accompanied a chastened Cheney into the meeting. But that has not always been the case. “It’s not just that she is imperious in dealing with our ambassadors,” notes a corporate lobbyist who is deeply involved in Middle East policy. “She’s got her own foreign policy, her own agenda, and so of course she wouldn’t want the ambassador to know what she is talking about when she meets a head of state.”

* * *

Soon after her return to the State Department in March 2005, Liz Cheney made news when she convened a controversial meeting with a handful of exiled Syrian activists to talk about regime change in Damascus. Leading the pack at the time was Farid al-Ghadry, a paradoxically pro-Israeli Syrian who’s maintained ties to neoconservatives in Washington and who is close to Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav Wurmser, the director of Middle East affairs for the Hudson Institute. According to Arab sources, it was Meyrav Wurmser who helped to arrange al-Ghadry’s tête-à-tête with Liz Cheney, Hannah, and other Bush administration officials.

Al-Ghadry, a Virginia businessman who founded the Reform Party of Syria, is widely seen in Arab circles as a lightweight with no credibility inside Syria. Mourhaf Jouejati, a professor of political science at George Washington University and an expert on Syrian politics, calls al-Ghadry a “mini-me of Ahmed Chalabi,” adding that Liz Cheney, Hannah, and the Wurmsers “are the backbone for Farid Ghadry’s movement. The question is, are they just seeking leverage with Syria, or is it a serious option? If it is the latter, I would be scared, because that means that they don’t know what they are doing.” One of the Syrians who took part in the meeting with Cheney and Hannah is Najib Ghadbian, an activist, author, and professor at the University of Arkansas. “Ghadry doesn’t have much following inside Syria,” Ghadbian admits. “Why are they behind him so much? Maybe they are following the Iraqi model, but al-Ghadry doesn’t even have the clout of Chalabi.” Perhaps another reason that al-Ghadry had the inside track with Cheney, Hannah, and Wurmser is that he is a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who has spoken at meetings of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, a think tank whose board of advisers includes Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and James Woolsey. (Since the meeting with Cheney a year ago, al-Ghadry has lost favor even in Syrian exile circles. A new group, calling itself the Syrian National Council, has emerged, elbowing al-Ghadry out of a leading role.)

Since then, and with the emergence of the reported Iran-Syria Operations Group, Liz Cheney has taken a leading role in the Bush administration’s campaign for regime change in both countries. While continuing to press Syria, the State Department has launched a campaign against Iran, separately from any military confrontation being worked on at the Pentagon. “It looks so déjà vu,” says Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, who compares the effort to America’s actions before war in Iraq. In addition to pressing the United Nations to impose tough new sanctions against Iran, Liz Cheney is coordinating an effort to rouse Iranian exiles to spark revolution inside the country. Besides seeking $75 million in additional funds for anti-Tehran activities, the State Department has created a brand new Office of Iranian Affairs, which sounds suspiciously like the Defense Department’s Office of Special Plans that was set up to coordinate pre-war planning for Iraq. And, according to a recent State Department planning document, the United States is setting up anti-Iranian intelligence and mobilization centers in Dubai, Istanbul, Ankara, Adana, Tel Aviv, Frankfurt, London, and Baku to work with “Iranian expatriate communities.”

Having set into motion much of this activity, Liz Cheney’s role in once again up in the air. Many at the State Department may breathe a sigh of relief this summer, when Cheney will once again likely take a leave of absence for the birth of her fifth child, expected in July. Even so, she will remain part of her father’s inner circle. And as the United States lurches toward a confrontation with Iran -- October Surprise anyone? -- Liz and Dick will be hand in hand.

Robert Dreyfuss is a Prospect senior correspondent.
© 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.

*M.Whitney (10/05)Deconstructing Judy Miller's Confession + Cheney too?

2006-06-01T19:24:00.000-07:00

*M.Whitney (10/05)Deconstructing Judy Miller's Confession + Cheney too?

Whitney's is the clearest article I've seen outlining Miller's and Cheney's criminal liabilities. Note also the following:

Clearly, both Miller and NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger were intimately involved in manufacturing the fraudulent evidence that dragged the nation to war.

I'm wondering what day to day role Sulzberger may have played. Clearly there was no managing or executive editorial control over Miller, but is there any information on what hands on role if any S may have played in greasing her way to those front page WMD stories?

If 10% of Whitney's optimism is on target, we're one (or a series of) indictment (s) away from bringing down the most criminal government this country has ever seen (a remarkable replica of Sinclair Lewis's _It Can't Happen Here_). I'm not a betting person, but here's one event I'd like to bet on. What are the odds?

See below for The (NY) Daily News speculating that the long knives may gather up Cheney himself.
Note: 6.1.06 -- I'm leaving the above in just to show how even the most jaded can relax into ridiculous optimism. I guess that's why we go on: we're always hoping. I guess without it, we can't live.
--RB

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney10172005.html
October 17, 2005

Last Gasp Before the Indictments?
Miller's Confession
By MIKE WHITNEY

If you plan to read Judy Miller's long and circuitous apology in the New York Times Sunday edition, bring your hip-waders. The obfuscating manure is knee-deep and bound to stymie even the most curious reader.

Miller's a slippery customer, but a picture is slowly developing of someone who was deeply involved in White House maneuverings to discredit Joseph Wilson.

It's clear now that Dick Cheney's right-hand man, Scooter Libby provided Miller with the name of ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame. Plame's name appears at least twice in the notebook Miller used when she interviewed Libby although she pretends that she cannot remember whether or not he furnished the name.

It's also clear that Libby tried to coerce Miller into silence by dispatching his lawyer, Joseph Tate, to tell Miller that she "was free to testify" but that Libby "had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson's wife." In other words, Libby lied to the Grand Jury and was signaling to Miller to shut up. If Miller told the truth she knew that Libby would go to jail and the administration would be exposed as plotting to disgrace Joseph Wilson.

Fortunately, Miller got tired of her role as 1st amendment martyr and decided to testify. That prompted Libby to send her a frantic letter which stated that "the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me." Libby was informing Miller as clearly as possible that she was the key figure in the investigation and advising her not to spill the beans.

Miller had a problem though, she had no way of knowing what the other reporters had said to the Grand Jury and she also had to weigh the possibilities of being indicted on perjury or obstruction charges. So she did what most people would do in her situation; she tip-toed through the questioning "denying and forgetting" as much as possible.

It's beginning to look like Miller is the pivotal figure in investigation and her role could be the undoing of the Bush regime. In one telling comment, Millers notes that (2 days before Robert Novak's article appeared in the Washington Post exposing CIA agent Valerie Plame) "I MIGHT HAVE CALLED OTHERS ABOUT MR WILSON'S WIFE".

Really? Two days before Novak's earth-shaking article Miller was giving out Plame's name?!?

This suggests that Miller may have been the ONLY reporter who got Plame's name from Libby and then spread it around to everyone else. No wonder Libby's so worried. That puts Miller at the very center of the Bush administration's biggest nightmare. Miller already admitted that Libby had told her that Plame "worked at Winpac. Winpac stood for Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control, the name of a unit within the CIA that, among other things, analyses the spread of unconventional weapons." (NY Times)

That's an odd thing to confide in a reporter if it's not intended to start a "leak". Remember, Miller never even wrote a story about anything she gathered from these private interviews with Libby.

So, what was her role? Were they just friends having a casual conversation or was she a mule for the information that the White House wanted to disseminate about Wilson?

Libby also asked Miller to have the Times refer to him as a "former Hill staffer" rather than "a senior administration official" in stories written about Wilson. He obviously didn't want it to seem like the administration was carrying out a personal vendetta against Wilson.

No problem. The administration makes a request and the New York Times carries it out forthwith. One hand washes the other.

The question remains, though, why the cover-up? Why would Libby care what the papers call him if, as he claims, he wasn't doing anything wrong?

The larger question is, however, where did Libby get Valerie Plame's name? The only person who would have had access to classified CIA information like that would have been his boss, Dick Cheney.

Ah-ha!

Cheney presided over a secret group of administration hawks known as the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). Their mission was to promote the danger of Saddam's WMD and discredit those who tried to mitigate the danger. The biggest part of their strategy was to exaggerate the threat of Saddam's imaginary nuclear weapons program. The administration knew through their own polling data that the American people would support a preemptive war if it appeared as though Saddam had nuclear weapons. So, it was incumbent on them to make the case.

Wilson's op-ed piece in the New York Times, challenged the administration's conclusions about Niger yellow-cake uranium, and undermined the claims about Saddam's nuclear capacity. So, Wilson had to be destroyed.

Miller, who had served as the conduit for most of the administration's phony stories about biological weapons sites, mobile-weapons labs, and aluminum tubes for nukes; was the logical choice to start the smear campaign against Wilson. Her role was to spread the "classified information" to her sources in the media who would, in turn, discredit Wilson.

Libby has done his best to protect Cheney from being implicated, saying that the VP didn't know anything about Wilson, but the claim is absurd. As Jason Leopold notes in Raw Story, "Cheney was present at several of the WHIG's meetings. They say Cheney personally discussed with individuals in attendance at least two interviews in May and June of 2003 Wilson gave to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, in which he claimed the administration "twisted" prewar intelligence and what the response from the administration should be." ("Vice President's Role in outing of CIA agent under Examination", Jason Leopold)

Leopold's article also points out the cozy relationship between the Miller and the members of WHIG prior to the Iraq war. After Miller had written her damning article about aluminum tubes in Iraq that could be used as centrifuges in nuclear weapons (a story that was later discredited); Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and Rice swung into high-gear, flooding the Sunday talk-shows and citing the story as proof that Saddam's nukes would ultimately engulf America in a "mushroom cloud".

The media's disinformation-campaign must have been coordinated with Miller and key members of the Bush administration. The plan worked flawlessly. Clearly, both Miller and NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger were intimately involved in manufacturing the fraudulent evidence that dragged the nation to war. Neither has ever expressed any regret over the role they played.

Libby's Caveat

Ironically, Libby's cryptic comments to Miller may turn out to be the best summary of the ongoing investigation. He said, "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."

Yes, and if Libby goes down, so will Cheney, Rove, Card, Rice, and perhaps even Bush, because "their roots connect them".

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

From Laura Rozen's blog:
http://warandpiece.com/
Holy Moly,
From the Daily News

A special prosecutor's intensifying focus into who outed a CIA spy has raised questions whether Vice President Cheney himself is involved, knowledgeable sources confirmed yesterday.

At least one source and one reporter who have testified in the probe said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is pursuing Cheney's role in the Valerie Plame affair.

In addition, at least six current and former Cheney staffers - most members of the White House Iraq Group - have testified before the grand jury, including the vice president's top honcho, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, and two top Cheney national security lieutenants.

Cheney's name has come up amid indications Fitzgerald may be edging closer to a blockbuster conspiracy charge - with help from a secret snitch.

"They have got a senior cooperating witness - someone who is giving them all of that," a source who has been questioned in the leak probe told the Daily News yesterday.

Cheney was questioned last year byprosecutors and has hired a private attorney, former colleague Terrence O'Donnell, who declined to comment when contacted by The News.

Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride only offered the standard canned response that her boss is cooperating.

Libby and President Bush's political mastermind Karl Rove remain the focus of the probe into whether Plame's cover was blown in a scheme to embarrass her husband, ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked claims that Iraq tried to buy nuclear materials in Niger.

Libby is often described as "Cheney's Cheney," a loyal and discreet lieutenant who shares his boss's hard-line philosophy and bareknuckle attitude toward political enemies of the Bush administration.

Cheney and Libby spend hours together in the course of a day, which causes sources who know both men very well to assert that any attempts to discredit Wilson would almost certainly have been known to the vice president.

"Scooter wouldn't be freelancing on this without Cheney's knowledge," a source told the Daily News. "It was probably some off-the-cuff thing: 'This guy [Wilson] could be a problem.'"

The News reported in July that Libby was "totally obsessed with Wilson." ...

Who could the senior cooperating witness be?
[In her update, not shown here, Rozen guesses that it might be Fleischer or Grossman.]

Friends:

Whitney's is the clearest article I've seen outlining Miller's and Cheney's criminal liabilities. Note also the following:

Clearly, both Miller and NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger were intimately involved in manufacturing the fraudulent evidence that dragged the nation to war.

At the risk of totally exposing my ignorance and complete naiveté, I'm wondering what day to day role Sulzberger may have played. Clearly there was no managing or executive editorial control over Miller, but is there any information on what hands on role if any S may have played in greasing her way to those front page WMD stories?

If 10% of Whitney's optimism is on target, we're one (or a series of) indictment (s) away from bringing down the most criminal government this country has ever seen (a remarkable replica of Sinclair Lewis's _It Can't Happen Here_). I'm not a betting person, but here's one event I'd like to bet on. What are the odds?

See below for The (NY) Daily News speculating that the long knives may gather up Cheney himself.

--RB

http://www.counterpunch.org/whitney10172005.html
October 17, 2005

Last Gasp Before the Indictments?
Miller's Confession
By MIKE WHITNEY

If you plan to read Judy Miller's long and circuitous apology in the New York Times Sunday edition, bring your hip-waders. The obfuscating manure is knee-deep and bound to stymie even the most curious reader.

Miller's a slippery customer, but a picture is slowly developing of someone who was deeply involved in White House maneuverings to discredit Joseph Wilson.

It's clear now that Dick Cheney's right-hand man, Scooter Libby provided Miller with the name of ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame. Plame's name appears at least twice in the notebook Miller used when she interviewed Libby although she pretends that she cannot remember whether or not he furnished the name.

It's also clear that Libby tried to coerce Miller into silence by dispatching his lawyer, Joseph Tate, to tell Miller that she "was free to testify" but that Libby "had not told Ms. Miller the name or undercover status of Mr. Wilson's wife." In other words, Libby lied to the Grand Jury and was signaling to Miller to shut up. If Miller told the truth she knew that Libby would go to jail and the administration would be exposed as plotting to disgrace Joseph Wilson.

Fortunately, Miller got tired of her role as 1st amendment martyr and decided to testify. That prompted Libby to send her a frantic letter which stated that "the public report of every other reporter's testimony makes clear that they did not discuss Ms. Plame's name or identity with me." Libby was informing Miller as clearly as possible that she was the key figure in the investigation and advising her not to spill the beans.

Miller had a problem though, she had no way of knowing what the other reporters had said to the Grand Jury and she also had to weigh the possibilities of being indicted on perjury or obstruction charges. So she did what most people would do in her situation; she tip-toed through the questioning "denying and forgetting" as much as possible.

It's beginning to look like Miller is the pivotal figure in investigation and her role could be the undoing of the Bush regime. In one telling comment, Millers notes that (2 days before Robert Novak's article appeared in the Washington Post exposing CIA agent Valerie Plame) "I MIGHT HAVE CALLED OTHERS ABOUT MR WILSON'S WIFE".

Really? Two days before Novak's earth-shaking article Miller was giving out Plame's name?!?

This suggests that Miller may have been the ONLY reporter who got Plame's name from Libby and then spread it around to everyone else. No wonder Libby's so worried. That puts Miller at the very center of the Bush administration's biggest nightmare. Miller already admitted that Libby had told her that Plame "worked at Winpac. Winpac stood for Weapons Intelligence, Non-Proliferation, and Arms Control, the name of a unit within the CIA that, among other things, analyses the spread of unconventional weapons." (NY Times)

That's an odd thing to confide in a reporter if it's not intended to start a "leak". Remember, Miller never even wrote a story about anything she gathered from these private interviews with Libby.

So, what was her role? Were they just friends having a casual conversation or was she a mule for the information that the White House wanted to disseminate about Wilson?

Libby also asked Miller to have the Times refer to him as a "former Hill staffer" rather than "a senior administration official" in stories written about Wilson. He obviously didn't want it to seem like the administration was carrying out a personal vendetta against Wilson.

No problem. The administration makes a request and the New York Times carries it out forthwith. One hand washes the other.

The question remains, though, why the cover-up? Why would Libby care what the papers call him if, as he claims, he wasn't doing anything wrong?

The larger question is, however, where did Libby get Valerie Plame's name? The only person who would have had access to classified CIA information like that would have been his boss, Dick Cheney.

Ah-ha!

Cheney presided over a secret group of administration hawks known as the White House Iraq Group (WHIG). Their mission was to promote the danger of Saddam's WMD and discredit those who tried to mitigate the danger. The biggest part of their strategy was to exaggerate the threat of Saddam's imaginary nuclear weapons program. The administration knew through their own polling data that the American people would support a preemptive war if it appeared as though Saddam had nuclear weapons. So, it was incumbent on them to make the case.

Wilson's op-ed piece in the New York Times, challenged the administration's conclusions about Niger yellow-cake uranium, and undermined the claims about Saddam's nuclear capacity. So, Wilson had to be destroyed.

Miller, who had served as the conduit for most of the administration's phony stories about biological weapons sites, mobile-weapons labs, and aluminum tubes for nukes; was the logical choice to start the smear campaign against Wilson. Her role was to spread the "classified information" to her sources in the media who would, in turn, discredit Wilson.

Libby has done his best to protect Cheney from being implicated, saying that the VP didn't know anything about Wilson, but the claim is absurd. As Jason Leopold notes in Raw Story, "Cheney was present at several of the WHIG's meetings. They say Cheney personally discussed with individuals in attendance at least two interviews in May and June of 2003 Wilson gave to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus, in which he claimed the administration "twisted" prewar intelligence and what the response from the administration should be." ("Vice President's Role in outing of CIA agent under Examination", Jason Leopold)

Leopold's article also points out the cozy relationship between the Miller and the members of WHIG prior to the Iraq war. After Miller had written her damning article about aluminum tubes in Iraq that could be used as centrifuges in nuclear weapons (a story that was later discredited); Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bush and Rice swung into high-gear, flooding the Sunday talk-shows and citing the story as proof that Saddam's nukes would ultimately engulf America in a "mushroom cloud".

The media's disinformation-campaign must have been coordinated with Miller and key members of the Bush administration. The plan worked flawlessly. Clearly, both Miller and NY Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger were intimately involved in manufacturing the fraudulent evidence that dragged the nation to war. Neither has ever expressed any regret over the role they played.

Libby's Caveat

Ironically, Libby's cryptic comments to Miller may turn out to be the best summary of the ongoing investigation. He said, "Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them."

Yes, and if Libby goes down, so will Cheney, Rove, Card, Rice, and perhaps even Bush, because "their roots connect them".

Mike Whitney lives in Washington state. He can be reached at: fergiewhitney@msn.com

From Laura Rozen's blog:
http://warandpiece.com/
Holy Moly,
From the Daily News

A special prosecutor's intensifying focus into who outed a CIA spy has raised questions whether Vice President Cheney himself is involved, knowledgeable sources confirmed yesterday.

At least one source and one reporter who have testified in the probe said U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is pursuing Cheney's role in the Valerie Plame affair.

In addition, at least six current and former Cheney staffers - most members of the White House Iraq Group - have testified before the grand jury, including the vice president's top honcho, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, and two top Cheney national security lieutenants.

Cheney's name has come up amid indications Fitzgerald may be edging closer to a blockbuster conspiracy charge - with help from a secret snitch.

"They have got a senior cooperating witness - someone who is giving them all of that," a source who has been questioned in the leak probe told the Daily News yesterday.

Cheney was questioned last year byprosecutors and has hired a private attorney, former colleague Terrence O'Donnell, who declined to comment when contacted by The News.

Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride only offered the standard canned response that her boss is cooperating.

Libby and President Bush's political mastermind Karl Rove remain the focus of the probe into whether Plame's cover was blown in a scheme to embarrass her husband, ex-Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who debunked claims that Iraq tried to buy nuclear materials in Niger.

Libby is often described as "Cheney's Cheney," a loyal and discreet lieutenant who shares his boss's hard-line philosophy and bareknuckle attitude toward political enemies of the Bush administration.

Cheney and Libby spend hours together in the course of a day, which causes sources who know both men very well to assert that any attempts to discredit Wilson would almost certainly have been known to the vice president.

"Scooter wouldn't be freelancing on this without Cheney's knowledge," a source told the Daily News. "It was probably some off-the-cuff thing: 'This guy [Wilson] could be a problem.'"

The News reported in July that Libby was "totally obsessed with Wilson." ...

Who could the senior cooperating witness be?
[In her update, not shown here, Rozen guesses that it might be Fleischer or Grossman.]

*R.Dreyfuss: Cheney's control of US gov't -- the enforcers

2006-05-28T10:28:00.000-07:00

Friends:
Is there anyone reading this who didn't realize from even before day 1 that Cheney was running this country? Robert Dreyfuss brilliantly provides the documentation and it's even worse than some of us naifs might have imagined: it turns out that with remarkable efficiency it gets down to every single policy decision Cheney desires. Read and weep. As if we couldn't tell: we've got the most vicious, most ruthless, most twisted extremist running the most powerful country in the world.

Some details: Here's an intro into how Cheney's group did what they could to make things as bad as possible in Israel/Palestine.

Last February, for example, after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, King Abdullah of Jordan visited Washington to discuss the implications of the vote. With the support of some officials in the State Department, the young king suggested that Washington should bolster beleaguered President Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, to counter the new power of Hamas

Here's how they control policy.

“The staff that the vice president sent out made sure that those [committees] didn’t key anything up that wasn’t what the vice president wanted,” says Wilkerson. “Their style was simply to sit and listen, and take notes. And if things looked like they were going to go speedily to a decision that they knew that the vice president wasn’t going to like, generally they would, at the end of the meeting, in great bureaucratic style, they’d say: ‘We totally disagree. Meeting’s over.’” At that point, policymakers from the nsc, the State Department, the Defense Department, and elsewhere would have to go back to the drawing board. And if a policy option that Cheney opposed somehow got written up as a decision memorandum and sent to the Oval Office, he showed up to kill it. “The vice president’s second or third bite at the apple was when he’d walk in to see the president,” says Wilkerson. “And things would get reversed, because of the vice president’s meeting in the Oval Office with no one else there.”

And here's their answer to the need for an enemy, in case we get bored with the bogus war on terror.

Many Cheney staffers were obsessed with what they saw as a looming, long-term threat from China. Several of Cheney’s highest-ranking national security aides came out of Congresswoman Christopher Cox’s rather wild-eyed 1990s investigation of alleged Chinese spying in the United States, tied to the overblown allegations about Chinese contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign. Cox, a California Republican, chaired a highly partisan committee that issued a scathing report about China. According to The New York Times, his 700-page report portrayed China as “nothing less than a voracious, dangerous, and fully-equipped military rival of the United States.” ...

For the Cheneyites, Middle East policy is tied to China, and in their view China’s appetite for oil makes it a strategic competitor to the United States in the Persian Gulf region. Thus, they regard the control of the Gulf as a zero-sum game. They believe that the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military buildup in Central Asia, the invasion of Iraq, and the expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Gulf states have combined to check China’s role in the region. In particular, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the creation of a pro-American regime in Baghdad was, for at least 10 years before 2003, a top neoconservative goal, one that united both the anti-China crowd and far-right supporters of Israel’s Likud. Both saw the invasion of Iraq as the prelude to an assault on neighboring Iran.

(It's not exactly clear from this last that Dreyfuss understands that these guys actually want a nuclear war with China.)

See also the details on Cheney's shadow NSC and Cheney's control of foreign policy.

Incredible article. Very revealing. This is how power works, and nobody knows how to play it better than Cheney and Rumsfeld.

Thanks to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now for featuring this article a few weeks ago.

--Ronald

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=11423
American Prospect
Vice Squad
From our May issue: They terrorize other government officials, and they’re so secretive that their names aren’t even revealed to a harmless federal employee directory. And they’ve helped ruin the country. Meet Dick Cheney’s staff.
By Robert Dreyfuss
Web Exclusive: 04.17.06

Bad heart, errant shotgun, and Halliburton stock options in tow, Dick Cheney has ruled the White House roost for the past five years, amassing enough power to give rise to the joke that George W. Bush is “a heartbeat away from the presidency.”

Yet, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of words have been written on Cheney’s role in the Bush administration, most of what’s been written fails to explain how the vice president wields his extraordinary authority. Notoriously opaque, the Office of the Vice President (OVP) is very difficult for journalists to penetrate. But a Prospect investigation shows that the key to Cheney’s influence lies with the corps of hard-line acolytes he assembled in 2001. They serve not only as his eyes and ears, monitoring a federal bureaucracy that resists many of Cheney’s pet initiatives, but sometimes serve as his fists, too, when the man from Wyoming feels that the passive-aggressive bureaucrats need bullying. Like disciplined Bolsheviks slicing through a fractious opposition, Cheney’s team operates with a single-minded, ideological focus on the exercise of American military power, a belief in the untrammeled power of the presidency, and a fierce penchant for secrecy.

Since 2001, reporters and columnists have tended to refer to Cheney’s office obliquely, if at all. Rather than explicitly discuss the neoconservative cabal that has assumed control of important parts of U.S. policy since September 11, they couple references to “the civilians at the Pentagon” with “officials in the vice president’s office” when referring to administration hard-liners. But rarely do the mainstream media provide much detail to explain who those people are, what they’ve done, and how they operate.

At the high-water mark of neoconservative power, when coalition forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, the vice president’s office was the command center for a web of like-minded officials in the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and other agencies, often described by former officials as “Dick Cheney’s spies.” Now, thanks to a misguided war and a bungled occupation, along with a string of foreign-policy failures that have alienated U.S. allies and triggered a wave of anti-American feeling around the globe, the numbers and influence of those Cheneyites outside the office have receded. No longer quite so commanding, the office seems more like a bunker for neoconservatives and their fellow travelers in the administration. Yet if only because of Dick Cheney’s Rasputin-like hold over the president, his office remains a formidable power indeed.

Still, for the first time, nervous Republicans are raising serious questions about Cheney. With his public approval plummeting to previously unknown depths for a major U.S. politician -- by late February he had fallen to just 18 percent -- he has lost all but the most reflexive of knee-jerk conservatives. With the vice president increasingly seen as a liability, there is a quiet murmur among GOP insiders about dumping him. The Moonie-linked Insight magazine, wired into right-wing Republicans, last month reported that moves are afoot to “retire” Cheney in 2007. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, former Bush Senior speechwriter Peggy Noonan gave full voice to the dump-Cheney idea. “I suspect what they’re thinking and not saying is, ‘If Dick Cheney weren’t vice president, who’d be a good vice president?’” she wrote. “And one night over drinks at a barbecue in McLean one top guy will turn to another top guy and say, … ‘wouldn’t you like to replace Cheney?’”

More often than not, from policy toward China and North Korea to the invasion of Iraq to pressure for regime change in Iran and Syria, and on issues from detentions to torture to spying by the National Security Agency, the muscle of the vice president’s office has prevailed.

Usually, that muscle is exercised covertly. Last February, for example, after Hamas won the Palestinian elections, King Abdullah of Jordan visited Washington to discuss the implications of the vote. With the support of some officials in the State Department, the young king suggested that Washington should bolster beleaguered President Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah leader, to counter the new power of Hamas.

Then John Hannah intervened. A former official at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Zionist think tank founded by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, Hannah is a neoconservative ideologue who, after the resignation of Irving Lewis “Scooter” Libby, moved up to become Vice President Dick Cheney’s top adviser on national security.

Hannah moved instantly to undermine Abdullah’s influence. Not only should the United States not deal with Hamas, but Abbas, Fatah, and the entire Palestinian Authority were no longer relevant, he argued, according to intelligence insiders. Speaking for the vice president’s office, Hannah instead sought to align U.S. policy with the go-it-alone strategy of Israel’s hard-liners, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his stricken patron and predecessor, Ariel Sharon. Olmert soon stunned observers by declaring that Israel would unilaterally set final borders in the West Bank, annexing large swaths of occupied land, by the year 2010. His declaration precisely mirrored Hannah’s argument that Israel should act alone.

Whether that viewpoint will prevail in the United States is unclear, but early indications are that the Bush administration is swinging in that direction. Hannah’s intervention is typical of how the OVP staff has engaged at all levels of the U.S. policy-making process to overcome opposition from professionals in the State Department, the intelligence community, and even the National Security Council (NSC) itself.

Richard Perle, who formerly served on the Defense Policy Board, insists that the power of those who share his worldview is exaggerated. “The myth of the power of the neoconservatives in the administration is exactly that,” says Perle. “The president holds the views that he holds. And the people you’re talking about are much closer to the president’s view than the people they are arguing against.” But officials who have opposed Cheney believe that President Bush has “views” only about basic principles, and that in making dozens of complex decisions he relies on pre-determined staff papers. Says one insider deeply involved in U.S. policy toward North Korea: “The president is given only the most basic notions about the Korea issue. They tell him, ‘Above South Korea is a country called North Korea. It is an evil regime.’ … So that translates into a presidential decision: Why enter into any agreement with an evil regime?”

Last fall, when U.S. envoy Christopher Hill was planning to visit North Korea to try to resolve the impasse over that country’s nuclear weapons, Cheney’s staff intervened to kill Hill’s mission, according to sources involved in planning his trip. That the Office of the Vice President can kill a major initiative by the State Department and the NSC, on an issue of the highest priority, is stark testament to the sustained power of the vice president’s office. And despite Cheney’s unpopularity -- and the parallel decline of neoconservative influence -- it remains a potent force.

* * *
Devoid of well-known names and faces, the OVP was nearly invisible to the public until last fall. That’s when “Scooter” Libby was indicted for lying to federal investigators in the Valerie Plame case, focusing the media spotlight on the vice president’s chief of staff and top national security adviser, who resigned immediately. Aside from Libby, however, virtually none of Cheney’s current aides has endured any scrutiny. Outside the Washington cognoscenti, it’s a safe bet that not one in a hundred Americans could name a single Cheney aide. Since 2001, the list has included David Addington, who replaced Libby; top national security advisers such as Eric Edelman and Victoria Nuland; radical-right Middle East specialists such as Hannah, William J. Luti, and David Wurmser; anti-China, geopolitical Asia hands like Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich; an assortment of conservative apparatchiks and technocrats, often neoconservative-connected, including C. Dean McGrath, Aaron Friedberg, Karen Knutson, and Carol Kuntz; lobbyists and domestic policy gurus, such as Nancy Dorn, Jonathan Burks, Nina Shokraiil Rees, Cesar Conda, and Candida Wolf -- and a host of communications directors, flacks, and spokespeople over the years, notably “Cheney’s angels”: Mary Matalin, Juleanna Glover Weiss, Jennifer Millerwise, Catherine Martin, and Lee Anne McBride.

It is the latter, especially Cheney’s press secretaries -- he has run through seven of them -- whose job is saying nothing, and saying it often. His press people seem shocked that a reporter would even ask for an interview with the staff. The blanket answer is no -- nobody is available. Amazingly, the vice president’s office flatly refuses to even disclose who works there, or what their titles are. “We just don’t give out that kind of information,” says Jennifer Mayfield, another of Cheney’s “angels.” She won’t say who is on staff, or what they do? No, she insists. “It’s just not something we talk about.” The notoriously silent OVP staff rebuffs not just pesky reporters but even innocuous database researchers from companies like Carroll Publishing, which puts out the quarterly Federal Directory. “They’re tight-lipped about the kind of information they put out,” says Albert Ruffin, senior editor at Carroll, who fumes that Cheney’s office doesn’t bother returning his calls when he’s updating the limited information he manages to collect.

The OVP’s enduring obsession with absolute secrecy first became obvious during the long court battle early in Bush’s first term over the energy task force chaired by Cheney. Neither the coalition of watchdog and environmental groups that sued the ovp nor members of Congress and the Government Accountability Office discovered much about the workings of the task force. Addington, then Cheney’s general counsel, enforced the say-nothing policy ultimately upheld by federal courts. “He engineered an extraordinary expansion of government power at the expense of accountability,” says Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, the conservative gadfly group that sued Cheney. “We got a terse letter back from Addington saying essentially, ‘Go jump in the lake.’”

Addington, 49, has spent almost exactly half of his life working for or working alongside Dick Cheney, from an impressionable youngster in his early 20s to the hard-nosed ideologue that he is today. They first met in the early 1980s, when Addington served as a counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency, the Iran-Contra Committee, and then the House Intelligence Committee, when Cheney was a member of the committee. When Cheney became secretary of defense, Addington was his special assistant and then the Defense Department’s general counsel. When Cheney toyed with running for president in the 1990s, Addington ran his political action committee. In the ovp, Addington has emerged as the single most militant advocate for the unfettered power of the presidency. “Early on, with the detainee issues, the torture issues, even before Abu Ghraib, people [would say] that David Addington is the source of all this stuff,” says a senior national security lawyer in Washington. “This stuff” includes the spectrum of controversial counterterrorism powers, from military tribunals for captured terror suspects, to justifying torture of prisoners, to detention of alleged terrorists without access to courts or counsel, to the legal rationale for ignoring the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in allowing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans. “He believes that in time of war, there is total authority for the president to waive any rules to carry out his objectives,” is how Congresswoman Jane Harman, the intelligence committee’s ranking Democrat, described Addington to The Washington Post. “Those views have extremely dangerous implications.”

Addington is typical of the staffers brought on in 2001, when Cheney began assembling what was dubbed, even then, a “shadow NSC.” Unlike previous administrations, including Bill Clinton’s, Cheney’s office was loaded for partisan bear from day one. Leon Fuerth, who led Al Gore’s office of national security affairs for eight years, says that their far smaller operation was led by nonpolitical or military staffers who weren’t vetted for political loyalties or ideology.

“The people who worked for me were all seconded from federal agencies, every one of them. They were uniformed officers from all three branches, people from the Department of Commerce, from the CIA, but all of them were professionals and civil servants,” says Fuerth. “I was the only politically appointed person. My deputy was at first an Air Force colonel, and after he retired, an Army colonel.” He recalls that one appointee, settling into an office in Fuerth’s shop, hung a portrait of Ronald Reagan.

There probably aren’t any portraits of Bill Clinton or FDR on the walls of Cheney’s OVP, which sprawls throughout the executive office building across the street from the White House. Instead, the staff -- hand-picked by Libby -- was drawn from the ranks of far-right think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, and WINEP, and from carefully screened Cheney loyalists in law firms around town -- all of whom hit the ground running.

Larry Wilkerson, formerly a top aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, is a no-nonsense, ex-military man who has spoken out bluntly about what he calls a “cabal” led by Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and their top aides. Time after time, in various interagency meetings, all the way up to the Cabinet-level “principals committee,” Wilkerson would watch in astonishment as Cheney’s staffers muscled everyone else.

“The staff that the vice president sent out made sure that those [committees] didn’t key anything up that wasn’t what the vice president wanted,” says Wilkerson. “Their style was simply to sit and listen, and take notes. And if things looked like they were going to go speedily to a decision that they knew that the vice president wasn’t going to like, generally they would, at the end of the meeting, in great bureaucratic style, they’d say: ‘We totally disagree. Meeting’s over.’” At that point, policymakers from the nsc, the State Department, the Defense Department, and elsewhere would have to go back to the drawing board. And if a policy option that Cheney opposed somehow got written up as a decision memorandum and sent to the Oval Office, he showed up to kill it. “The vice president’s second or third bite at the apple was when he’d walk in to see the president,” says Wilkerson. “And things would get reversed, because of the vice president’s meeting in the Oval Office with no one else there.”

According to Fuerth, such a skewed modus operandi was unthinkable in the Clinton-Gore administration. “There is no doubt that we exercised a great deal of influence, but it was never in the form of a peremptory, you-may-not-go-down-this-path, or you-must-go-down-this-path,” he says. “It was advisory.”

Former Cheney aides tend to confirm Wilkerson’s version of how the OVP operates. Dean McGrath, who served as Cheney’s deputy chief of staff under Libby from 2001 until last year, says he didn’t hesitate to express the vice president’s views during the policy-making process. “I tried to convey at meetings where he would come down on issues,” says McGrath. An important mission of the OVP was to do battle with a resistant bureaucracy. “Often you’d have the permanent bureaucracy that was not on board, especially on all of the issues where you’re trying to change things,” he says.

Aaron Friedberg, who served as Cheney’s director of policy planning for three years, agrees that the bureaucracy was often an obstacle. “It’s not an active resistance. It’s a passive skepticism about the whole direction of policy.” Friedberg, who says that he worked on issues of “terrorism, Asia, Europe, Russia, North Korea, Iran, just about everything outside of Iraq,” suggested that the biggest issue on which Cheney had to confront the bureaucracy was over the administration’s push for democracy, especially in the Middle East. That program’s overseer is his daughter Liz Cheney, a top State Department official.

Wilkerson portrays the vice president’s office as the source of a zealous, almost messianic approach to foreign affairs. “There were several remarkable things about the vice president’s staff,” he says. “One was how empowered they were, and one was how in sync they were. In fact, we used to say about both [Rumsfeld’s office] and the vice president’s office that they were going to win nine out of ten battles, because they are ruthless, because they have a strategy, and because they never, ever deviate from that strategy … They make a decision, and they make it in secret, and they make in a different way than the rest of the bureaucracy makes it, and then suddenly foist it on the government -- and the rest of the government is all confused.”

Often the rest of the U.S. government -- including even the NSC -- would operate outside the normal interagency process to prevent the OVP from interfering, according to officials who asked to remain anonymous. Perhaps most startling is the sidetracking of the NSC, which is by statute the ultimate arbiter for policy options and recommendations that go to the president’s desk.

According to Wilkerson, Cheney’s office and the NSC were completely separate on foreign policy. Cheney, says Wilkerson, “set up a staff that knew what the statutory nsc was doing, but the NSC statutory staff didn’t know what his staff was doing. The vice president’s staff could read the statutory NSC’s e-mail, but the NSC couldn’t read their e-mail. So, once someone on the statutory NSC figured it out, they used various work-arounds. Like, for example, they would walk to someone’s office, rather than send an e-mail, if what they were going to talk about they didn’t want to reveal to the vice president’s very powerful staff.” But that was difficult because of Cheney “spies” within the bureaucracy, including people like John Bolton at the State Department, Robert Joseph at the NSC, certain staffers at WINPAC (the arms control shop at CIA), and various Pentagon officials, he adds.

Two of the people most often encountered by Wilkerson were Cheney’s Asia hands, Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich. Through them, the fulcrum of Cheney’s foreign policy -- which linked energy, China, Iraq, Israel, and oil in the Middle East -- can be traced. The nexus of those interrelated issues drives the OVP’s broad outlook.

Many Cheney staffers were obsessed with what they saw as a looming, long-term threat from China. Several of Cheney’s highest-ranking national security aides came out of Congresswoman Christopher Cox’s rather wild-eyed 1990s investigation of alleged Chinese spying in the United States, tied to the overblown allegations about Chinese contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign. Cox, a California Republican, chaired a highly partisan committee that issued a scathing report about China. According to The New York Times, his 700-page report portrayed China as “nothing less than a voracious, dangerous, and fully-equipped military rival of the United States.” Among the top Cheney aides who joined the OVP in 2001 from Cox’s staff were Libby, who served as legal adviser to the committee; McGrath, a key staffer for Cox; and Jonathan Burks, a senior Cox aide who became Cheney’s special assistant. Yates, who joined the team from The Heritage Foundation, is a China specialist who has long urged a more confrontational policy. In 2000, he wrote a Heritage paper offering advice to the Bush administration, and slamming Clinton for accommodating China. He urged a stronger, pro-Taiwan policy while predicting a Chinese attack. Charles W. Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to China and has known Yates for many years, puts him in the same category as former Defense Department officials Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who “all saw China as the solution to ‘enemy deprivation syndrome.’”

Yates, who left Cheney’s office recently to join the ultraconservative lobbying and law firm of Barbour, Griffith, Rogers, had an important impact on Asia and Middle East policy. Says Wilkerson: “Generally Steve was quiet. But when there came a time for him to speak, the room grew very silent, and that did it. We weren’t going any further in that discussion item if Steve said that the vice president didn’t like it. And it didn’t take too long to understand that the real power in the room was sitting there from the vice president’s office.” Yates declined to comment for this story, but in an interview with National Journal he pooh-poohed the idea that Cheney’s office had set itself up as a shadow NSC. “The idea that 10 or 15 people can replicate or supplant the work of the 100 to 200 people on the NSC … is a bit unrealistic,” he said.

For the Cheneyites, Middle East policy is tied to China, and in their view China’s appetite for oil makes it a strategic competitor to the United States in the Persian Gulf region. Thus, they regard the control of the Gulf as a zero-sum game. They believe that the invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. military buildup in Central Asia, the invasion of Iraq, and the expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Gulf states have combined to check China’s role in the region. In particular, the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the creation of a pro-American regime in Baghdad was, for at least 10 years before 2003, a top neoconservative goal, one that united both the anti-China crowd and far-right supporters of Israel’s Likud. Both saw the invasion of Iraq as the prelude to an assault on neighboring Iran.

Several of Cheney’s top aides, as well as the vice president himself, were early supporters of the neoconservative flagship Project for a New American Century, whose founding statement called for a return to a “Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity.” Among them were Libby, Friedberg, and Robert Kagan, who is married to Victoria Nuland, the U.S. ambassador to NATO who served as national security adviser in the OVP. She, in turn, succeeded Eric Edelman, another neoconservative who left the vice president’s office to serve as ambassador to Turkey before taking over Douglas Feith’s job as chief of policy for the Department of Defense.

The pivotal role of Cheney’s staff in promoting war in Iraq has been well documented. Cheney was the war’s most vocal advocate, and his staff -- especially Libby, Hannah, Ravich, and others -- worked hard to “fit” intelligence to inflate Iraq’s seeming threat. William J. Luti, a neoconservative radical, left Cheney’s office for the Pentagon in 2001, where he organized the war planning team called the Office of Special Plans. David Wurmser, another neoconservative from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), joined the Pentagon to found the forerunner of the OSP, the so-called Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which then manufactured the evidence that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were allies. To that end, Wurmser worked closely with Hannah, Libby, Luti, and Harold Rhode, a Defense Department official in Andy Marshall’s Office of Net Assessment. Ravich, along with Zalmay Khalilzad, a neoconservative Middle East analyst and now U.S. ambassador to Iraq, worked hard to build the Iraqi National Congress–linked opposition forces under Ahmad Chalabi. Libby and Hannah produced key propaganda for the war, including the most inflammatory and inaccurate speeches delivered by Cheney and Bush. The Libby-Hannah team also authored a 48-page speech for Colin Powell’s 2003 United Nations appearance so extreme that Powell trashed the entire document. That version has never been released.

David L. Phillips, the author of Losing Iraq, was a State Department consultant during the prelude to the war in 2003, and he watched Ravich operate. His account provides a perfect paradigm for the OVP’s role in interagency meetings, in this case involving the most important decision of the administration’s tenure: the decision to go to war in Iraq. During meeting after meeting in London, in Brussels, or in Washington with Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and the rest of the Iraqi opposition (including its Shiite fundamentalist component), the youthful, inexperienced Ravich dominated the course of events because of her association with Cheney. “The State Department officials showed extraordinary deference to her,” says Phillips. “It was almost a sense that their efforts would be judged by Ms. Ravich and reported to the OVP.” The INC and Chalabi “would run to Samantha when there were disagreements.” In those meetings, the INC “would hold forth on their ties to the OVP as a form of threat over U.S. officials or other Iraqis. And U.S. officials felt that if there was a misstep, the Iraqis would go running to the OVP and they would have their chains yanked,” says Phillips. In Washington, Hannah served as the INC’s chief political point of contact, according to Entifadh Qanbar, an INC official who is serving as defense attaché at the Iraqi embassy.

Like Hannah, who came to the OVP from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Wurmser traipsed a roundabout path to Cheney’s staff: He worked with Hannah at WINEP in the 1990s, and then went to AEI, where he directed Middle East affairs, to the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, to John Bolton’s arms control shop at the State Department, and then to the OVP. Even among ardent supporters of Israel, Wurmser -- and his wife, Meyrav, who runs the Hudson Institute’s Middle East program -- is considered an extremist. In 1996, the Wurmsers, Perle, and Feith co-authored the famous “Clean Break” paper for then–Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, which called for radical measures to redraw the map of the entire Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Palestine) to benefit Israel. Later, in a series of papers and a book, Wurmser argued that toppling Saddam was likely to lead directly to civil war and the breakup of Iraq, but he supported the policy anyway: “The residual unity of [Iraq] is an illusion projected by the extreme repression of the state.” After Saddam, Iraq will “be ripped apart by the politics of warlords, tribes, clans, sects, and key families,” he wrote. “Underneath facades of unity enforced by state repression, [Iraq’s] politics is defined primarily by tribalism, sectarianism, and gang/clan-like competition.” Yet Wurmser explicitly urged the United States and Israel to “expedite” such a collapse. “The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.” Later, with former CIA director James Woolsey and others, Wurmser proposed restoring the Jordan-based Hashemite monarchy in Iraq. While Wurmser’s OVP allies may share his neoconservative fantasies of the willy-nilly reorganization of the Middle East, few experts do. “I’ve known him for years, and I consider him to be a naive simpleton,” says a former U.S. ambassador. Adds Wilkerson, “A lot of these guys, including Wurmser, I looked at as card-carrying members of the Likud party, as I did with Feith. You wouldn’t open their wallet and find a card, but I often wondered if their primary allegiance was to their own country or to Israel. That was the thing that troubled me, because there was so much that they said and did that looked like it was more reflective of Israel’s interest than our own.”

Today Wurmser, Hannah, Liz Cheney, and her father are pushing hard for confrontations with both Iran and Syria. Liz Cheney, who exercises enormous power inside the State Department, has secured millions of dollars to support opposition elements in both countries, and she has met with Syria’s version of Ahmad Chalabi, a discredited businessman from Virginia named Farid al-Ghadry. Hannah sat in on the meeting with Ghadry, which was arranged through Meyrav Wurmser, a friend of the would-be Syrian leader. Hannah and Wurmser’s boss, the vice president, talks freely about the need for a military showdown with Iran to destroy its alleged nuclear program. The true measure of how powerful the vice president’s office remains today is whether the United States chooses to confront Iran and Syria or to seek diplomatic solutions. For the moment, at least, the war party led by Dick Cheney remains in ascendancy.

Robert Dreyfuss is a Prospect senior correspondent.

© 2006 by The American Prospect, Inc.

*helpless/ D. Schechter: Why is the Media Downplaying Our Voting Scandal?

2006-05-23T19:37:00.000-07:00

Friends:
Schechter nails it here. Few besides him except blogger Xymphora has been paying any attention. The Times recently carried an article which hints at the problem but also makes clear that it has no interest in following up, not even to the extent of 2004 when they carrried a (partially incorrect) map of states where there were a substantial number of districts with electronic voting machines.
Blogger Xymphora has pointed to the Republican strategy for this year's election. Allow just enough Democratic victories to keep it below the radar but make sure that control of both houses of Congress stay Republican. Make sure that there are no investigations, no impeachment proceedings.
NPR's Saturday edition 5/20 did a story on the subject and actually talked about the back door (although they didn't use the term) Diebold has thoughtfully included in all its machines, making fraud child's play. The segment made it clear that there is absolutely no control of what happens to the machines before or after the election, nor is there any control of what happens to the tallies once they are sent to central locations in the states. Predictably the NPR story ended on the feel good note of citing one state, New Mexico, where unverifable voting is outlawed due to Democratic governor Richardson's efforts.
I haven't seen one story explaining why NY state is among the last to accept electronic voting and is out of compliance wth HAVA. Could it possibly be due to Pataki's so far successful efforts to frustrate a verifed option for New Yorkers?
One point that should be emphasized is that Bush/Cheney have been able to go forward with such radical unpopular policies precisely because they understood that there would be no price to pay electorally.
John Kerry's silence on this issue has played a key role enabling the evildoers. The only question is whether he's a traitor at heart, whether he really didn't want to be president -- a theory made plausible by the campaign that he ran -- or whether there was enormous pressure on him to concede immediately in 2004. On Democracy Now about 6 months ago, testimony was presented indicating that Kerry was pressured or merely understood that the brutal attack on Fallujah couldn't go forward until his concession.
Is it astonishing that the Democrats are silent on such an issue? . As we seek for explanations, all we have to do is to look at the political landscape where effectively little or nothing is done on any media or political level about any of the innumerable scandals and outrages, perhaps the worst of which is the reckless destruction of the US and the world economy. We seem to be in a political/historical moment akin to Neil Yong's song, Helpless.
Thanks to JG for passing this along.
--Ronald

Published on Friday, May 19, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Why is the Media Downplaying Our Voting Scandal?
by Danny Schechter

Explain this to me. Why do so few of our TV "journalists" and political reporters seem interested in all the questions that have been raised about the integrity of our voting system?

Voting is at the heart of our democracy. Billions of dollars are spent on political campaigns and tens of millions on covering them. All the networks have election units complete with pollsters, analysts and experts up the kazoo. All of them sound authoritative and spice their commentary with personal war stories and a parade of insider anecdotes.

Just tune in any election night and you have to marvel at all the space age technology, fancy graphics and computer assisted projections. The anchors seem to know as much about the history of voting percentages in each Congressional district as fanatical baseball fans recall earned run averages and the speed of each pitch.

If there are ten military men and women backing up each soldier in the field, there are tens of political aides, advisors, interns and hangers on "supporting" our elected politicians, or is it poli-trikians?. Handicapping elections is one of their specialties and they know most of the races and players by heart.

Compared to corporate machinations, or even military-industrial decisions, politics is over-covered, And yet the actual process of voting—the machines, the counting, the verification, and the questions raised by well informed journalists and analysts about voting fraud seem to bore the punditocracy.

I know because I made a film, Counting on Democracy about what actually happened in Florida in what is still of the most controversial elections in our history, with the popular votes won by Gore and the election won by Bush. 175,000 votes went uncounted. Once it was decided that the GOP won, most of the media lost interest. Very few journalists looked into what the ACLU called "the tyranny of small decisions" that affected the vote.

A media review of the outcome was postponed for months and came to convoluted conclusions although the New York Times reporter who led it told me they found that Gore won. That's not what his own newspaper reported in a story that was so dense that it was hard to understand what it was saying. It was one of those pieces where the headline said one thing, the text something else.

Every one agreed that the election process was broken but there was little media attention paid to how to fix it. Once fancy new electronic voting machines appeared on the scene, many journalists seemed to promulgate the idea of "crisis over" because, in their worldwiew, technology solves all problems. Perhaps, that's because so many of them think hey are tech savvy and rely on computers every day. Yet concerns about a paper trail and verification are shunted aside as issues taken seriously only by the grumpy or conspiratorial among us.

Fast Forward to 2004. I was covering the Democratic Convention in Boston. So was Michael Moore and Greg Palast and others who were concerned that the 2004 election could become a repeat of 2000. I attended a breakfast at the Florida delegation which assured me that their problems most decidedly had not been fixed. Palast who studied the way felons and others were disenfranchised in 2000 warned that those forces who want to fix our elections were more sophisticated than ever. Everyone expressed concerns that Ohio could turn into the Florida of 2004. Oddly, the Democratic Party and its candidate didn't take the concerns seriously, or prepare for the predicted eventualities. It was business as usual.

We filmed the concerns being expressed in Boston with no response, and then for "balance" went to the GOP love fest in New York where we were told there was nothing to worry about. We edited a new beginning to our award winning film Counting on Democracy and went back to the Independent Television Service which helped fund it and got it on PBS to see if public television stations would rebroadcast it.

To our surprise, not one would. It is as if the fiasco in Florida had been forgotten. That's right, not one station would broadcast it. That's a ZERO response to a film that had been well received just four years earlier with millions saying then 'we will never forget Flori-duh.' How quickly we forgot! It was if there had been national outbreak of media-fed amnesia.

And then, as predicted in 2004, came the calamity in Ohio. Concerns with ballot rigging and other methods used to dampen Democratic turn out were briefly noted and barely pursued or covered. Kphn Kerry seemed bullied into accepting an outcome that many had doubts about. More recently accounts from across the country of breakdowns in electronic voting machines were glossed over. All were reported locally but, together, never aggregated to become the kind of national story and scandal they should be.

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman who follow this story closely and wrote a book about what really went down in Ohio comment in a recent story in the Free Press published in Columbus Ohio, "there has been barely a whiff of coverage in the major media about any problems with the electronic voting machines."

The public on the other hand not only believes that there are problems but many insist that the elections were stolen. Write Wasserman and Fitrakis: "A recent OpEdNews/Zogby People's poll of Pennsylvania residents, found that "39% said that the 2004 election was stolen. 54% said it was legitimate. But let's look at the demographics on this question. Of the people who watch Fox news as their primary source of TV news, one half of one percent believe it was stolen and 99% believe it was legitimate. Among people who watched ANY other news source but FOX, more felt the election was stolen than legitimate. The numbers varied dramatically."

"Here, from that poll, are the stations listed as first choice by respondents and the percentage of respondents who thought the election was stolen: CNN 70%; MSNBC 65%; CBS 64%; ABC 56%; Other 56%; NBC 49%; FOX 0.5%.

"With 99% of Fox viewers believing that the election was "legitimate," only the constant propaganda of Rupert Murdoch's disinformation campaign stands in the way of a majority of Americans coming to grips with the reality of two consecutive stolen elections."

Bi-partisan Commissions have studied this problem. One led by ex-president Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker noted, "Software can be modified maliciously before being installed into individual voting machines. There is no reason to trust insiders in the election industry any more than in other industries."

A recent Wall Street Journal story revealed, "Some former backers of the technology seek return to paper ballots, citing glitches, fraud fears."

Aviel Rubin, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University, did an analysis of the security flaws in the source code for Diebold touch-screen machine. After studying the latest problems, The Times reported Rubin said: "I almost had a heart attack. The implications of this are pretty astounding."

Worse still, the Congress is burying reform measures with scant media attention. Chellie Pingree, president of Common Cause writes: "What is Congress doing? Nothing. Right now HR 550, The Voter Confidence and Increased Accessibility Act the bill, which would take care of these problems, is languishing in committee. The bill has 186 cosponsors, more support than most bills voted on in the House."

Stories like this just dribble out with little follow up and less investigation. Isn't the threat to democracy here self-evident and worthy of more media attention? The press has a long tradition of skepticism. Have they become skeptical about the workings of democracy itself? Why has the heart of our democratic process become such a 'ho-hummer,"

Don't they realize the truth expressed by one of our Mediachannel readers Donna Perlmutter who writes: "Without free, fair elections, nothing else matters."

New Dissector Danny Schechter is "blogger in chief" at MediaChannel. Org and author of " The Death of the Media and the Fight to Save Democracy" News. Email to: dissector@mediachannel.org

© 2006 MediaChannel.org

Al Jazeera (3/05): US Killings in Falluja

2006-02-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Kurt Nimmo for linking to this article. See his entry for March 18, 2005 Mass Murder in Fallujah: Old News Makes the Rounds

You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/6890A8DA-AF79-45AD-BB4F-42C060978A07.htm

Journalists tell of US Falluja killings

Thursday 17 March 2005 10:41 AM GMT

Journalists accuse US soldiers of targeting children

All is quiet in Falluja, or at least that is how it seems, given that the mainstream media has largely forgotten about the Iraqi city. But independent journalists are risking life and limb to bring out a very different story.

The picture they are painting is of US soldiers killing whole families, including children, attacks on hospitals and doctors, the use of napalm-like weapons and sections of the city destroyed.

One of the few reporters who has reached Falluja is American Dahr Jamail of the Inter Press Service. He interviewed a doctor who had filmed the testimony of a 16-year-old girl.

"She stayed for three days with the bodies of her family who were killed in their home. When the soldiers entered she was in her home with her father, mother, 12 year-old brother and two sisters.

She watched the soldiers enter and shoot her mother and father directly, without saying anything. They beat her two sisters, then shot them in the head. After this her brother was enraged and ran at the soldiers while shouting at them, so they shot him dead," Jamail relates.

Disturbing reports

Another report comes from an aid convoy headed up by Dr Salem Ismael. He was in Falluja last month. As well as delivering aid he photographed the dead, including children, and interviewed remaining residents.

Again his story does not tally with the indifference shown by the main media networks.

"The accounts I heard ... will live with me forever. You may think you know what happened in Falluja, but the truth is worse than you could possibly have imagined"

Dr Salem Ismael,
aid convoy leader

"The accounts I heard ... will live with me forever. You may think you know what happened in Falluja, but the truth is worse than you could possibly have imagined," he says.

He relates the story of Hudda Fawzi Salam Issawi from the Julan district of Falluja: "Five of us, including a 55-year-old neighbour, were trapped together in our house in Falluja when the siege began. On 9 November American marines came to our house.

'My father and the neighbour went to the door to meet them. We were not fighters. We thought we had nothing to fear. I ran into the kitchen to put on my veil, since men were going to enter our house and it would be wrong for them to see me with my hair uncovered.

"This saved my life. As my father and neighbour approached the door, the Americans opened fire on them. They died instantly.

"Me and my 13-year-old brother hid in the kitchen behind the fridge. The soldiers came into the house and caught my older sister. They beat her. Then they shot her. But they did not see me. Soon they left, but not before they had destroyed our furniture and stolen the money from my father's pocket."

Targeting media

Journalist and writer Naomi Klein has also come under attack for insisting that US forces are eliminating those who dare to count casualties.

No less than the US ambassador to the UK David Johnson wrote a letter to British newspaper The Guardian that published Klein's work, demanding evidence, which she then provided.

The first piece of evidence Klein sent to Johnson was that the hospital in Falluja was raided to stop any reporting of casualties, a tactic that was later repeated in Mosul.

"The first major operation by US marines and Iraqi soldiers was to storm Falluja general hospital, arresting doctors and placing the facility under military control.

US troops have reportedly used
napalm-like weapons

"The New York Times reported that 'the hospital was selected as an early target because the American military believed that it was the source of rumours about heavy casualties', noting that 'this time around, the American military intends to fight its own information war, countering or squelching what has been one of the insurgents' most potent weapons'.

The Los Angeles Times quoted a doctor as saying that the soldiers 'stole the mobile phones' at the hospital - preventing doctors from communicating with the outside world."

As Dahr Jamail reports from his online diary "doctors are now technically forbidden to talk to the media or allow them to take photos in Iraqi hospitals unless granted permission from the Ministry of Health and its US-adviser".

Napalm-like weapons

Allied to this are various reports of the US using napalm and napalm-like weaponry in Falluja.

US troops are accused of
threatening Falluja hospital staff

Jamail recounts: "Last November, another Falluja refugee from the Julan area, Abu Sabah, told me: 'They (US military) used these weird bombs that put up smoke like a mushroom cloud. Then small pieces fall from the air with long tails of smoke behind them.'

"He explained that pieces of these bombs exploded into large fires that burned peoples' skin even when water was dumped on their bodies, which is the effect of phosphorous weapons, as well as napalm."

The reports of the use of napalm in civilian areas are widespread, as are many other frightening allegations.

The attacks on the hospitals and medical facilities in Falluja are also in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions.

But as Richard Perle, a senior adviser to US President George Bush said at the start of the Iraq war: "The greatest triumph of the Iraq war is the destruction of the evil of international law."

Aljazeera
You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/6890A8DA-AF79-45AD-BB4F-42C060978A07.htm

Max Fuller (10/05) Death Squads in Iraq and the Media

2006-02-01T10:50:00.000-08:00

This is a brilliant article suggesting that US-UK occupation authorities are intent on creating a civil war in Iraq -- and succeeding. There's a lot of information, some of it dense, but it's well worth the time. As Fuller suggests, the capture of two Brits in Basra in a car full of explosives was a clear indication of who's behind much of the killing.

Thus there appear to be 3 main groups responsible for much of the carnage: Nationalist insurgents (mostly Sunnis, apparently ), CIA backed death squads killing Sunnis and ditto killing Shiites.

Needless to say we're not going to see the major media tracking down any of these leads, even when some of them are embarrassingly out in the open and even when the carnage is so horrendous. The majors have their reputations and advertisers to consider.

Some may recall Tariq Ali wondering in the early days of the occupation who was killing all those professionals and intellectuals and potential political leaders. Apparently about a thousand such people, perhaps the cream of Iraqi society were killed.

(Thanks to CL for passing this along.) --RB

Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq

by Max Fuller

November 10, 2005
GlobalResearch.ca

Abstract

The phenomenon of death squads operating in Iraq has become generally accepted over recent months. However, in its treatment of the issue, the mainstream media has zealously followed a line of attributing extrajudicial killings to unaccountable Shia militias who have risen to prominence with the electoral victory of Ibramhim Jafaari’s Shia-led government in January. The following article examines both the way in which the information has been widely presented and whether that presentation has any actual basis in fact. Concluding that the attribution to Shia militias is unsustainable, the article considers who the intellectual authors of these crimes against humanity are and what purpose they serve in the context of the ongoing occupation of the country.

Shortly before dawn on 14 September 2005, just hours before a huge bomb exploded in Baghdad killing 88 labourers, around 50 men in army uniforms arrived at the village of Taji 16km north of Baghdad in military vehicles, bearing military identification. After searching the village, they seized 17 local men, described by one witness as vegetable sellers, ice sellers and taxi drivers. Handcuffed and blindfolded, the men were led from their homes before being shot in the head in the main square (Newsday, Al Jazeera, Juan Cole).

Such killings represent a pattern of violence as frightening as and perhaps more systematic than the steady wave of bombings targeting civilians in occupied Iraq. Whilst the pattern of death-squad-style executions is broadly recognised, it remains badly understood and, in its representation, deeply distorted.

The appearance of death squads was first highlighted in May this year, when over a 10-day period dozens of bodies were found casually disposed of in rubbish dumps and vacant areas around Baghdad. All of the victims had been handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the head and many of them also showed signs of having been brutally tortured. On 5 May 15 bodies were discovered in an industrial area called Kasra-Wa-Atash and subsequently identified as belonging to a group of farmers seized from a Baghdad market. The bodies revealed such torture marks as broken skulls, burning, beatings and right eyeballs removed. Witnesses claimed the men had been arrested by members of the security forces (BBC, Guardian). Less than two weeks later, 15 more bodies were found at two sites (KUNA). According to the chairman of the Sunni Waqf court, Adnan Muhammad Salman, the victims were Sunnis who had been arrested at their homes or at mosques (ArabicNews.com).

The evidence was sufficiently compelling for the Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), a leading Sunni organisation, to issue public statements in which they accused the security forces attached to the Ministry of the Interior as well as the Badr Brigade, the former armed wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), of being behind the killings. They also accused the Ministry of the Interior of conducting state terrorism (Financial Times).

Since then, a steady stream of the victims of extrajudicial killings has flowed through the Baghdad morgue. Characteristically, the victims’ hands are tied or handcuffed behind their backs and they have been blindfolded. In most cases they also appear to have been whipped with a cord, subjected to electric shocks or beaten with a blunt object and shot to death, often with single bullets to the head. Yasser Salihee, a journalist for Knight Ridder investigating the bodies, wrote that eyewitnesses claimed many of the victims were seized by men wearing commando uniforms in white Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings. (Knight Ridder). Salihee’s last article was published on 27 June, three days after he was fatally shot by a US sniper at a routine checkpoint.

It is impossible to know exactly how many people are being killed in this way. Salihee reported that more than 30 examples occurred in less than a week, while Faik Baqr, director of Baghdad’s central morgue, states that before the occupation of Iraq, the morgue handled 200 to 250 suspicious deaths a month, of which perhaps 16 had firearm injuries. Now the figure is between 700 and 800, with some 500 firearm wounds (op. cit.). The Independent’s Robert Fisk adds that there are so many bodies that human remains are stacked on top of each other and unidentified bodies are rapidly disposed of (Robert Fisk).

The killings have not been confined to Baghdad. For example, on 24 June six farmers were taken from the village of Hashmiyat 15km west of Baquba by men in army uniform; their decapitated bodies were found soon afterwards a mile from their homes (Associated Press). More recently, on 8 September, 18 people were abducted from the town of Iskandriyah 40km south of the capital by men in National Guard Uniforms and executed in isolated open land (Xinhuanet). These few examples represent the tip of a rapidly expanding iceberg, with the majority of extrajudicial-style killings seriously under-investigated and underreported.

In response to the accusations of police involvement, drawing on eyewitness accounts, Iraq’s new Ministry of the Interior claims that it is easy to get hold of police uniforms and that the killings are the work of ‘insurgents’ masquerading as security forces in order to create sectarian divisions (BBC). Such denials are echoed by US special advisor to the ministry Steven Casteel, who has stated that, ‘The small numbers that we’ve investigated we’ve found to be either rumor or innuendo’ (Salihee, op. cit.).

Despite such denials, few journalists have been able to dismiss what the Observer’s foreign editor Peter Beaumont describes as the ‘extraordinary sense of impunity with which these abductions and killings take place’ as mere innuendo (Observer), or the consistent eye-witness accounts of the kidnappers appearing with expensive foreign equipment issued to the security forces, such as the Toyota Land Cruisers and the Glock 9mm pistols, as simply rumour (Salihee, op. cit.). The Interior Ministry’s explanation of large, heavily armed groups of resistance fighters moving freely about the capital becomes even less plausible when one considers that many of the killings took place following the onset of Operation Lightning/Thunder in late May. This divisional-size operation saw the deployment of 40,000 Iraqi troops, who sealed Baghdad and installed 675 checkpoints around the city (Associated Press). Hundreds of arrests followed as the security forces began to ‘hunt down insurgents’ (BBC). According to the AMS, in one instance, on 13 July, dozens of Interior Ministry commandos stormed several houses in northern Baghdad and detained 13 people, before torturing and killing them in a nearby apartment (Gulf Daily News).

However, instead of placing the blame squarely on the apparatus of the new Iraqi state, the mainstream media has almost exclusively chosen to shift the emphasis away, resorting to a number of standardised literary devices. The first device is to frame extrajudicial killings in the context of a wider panoply of supposed retaliatory sectarian violence. For example, Francis Curta of the Associated French Press writes that ‘A series of tit-for-tat killings has raised sectarian tension to boiling points’ (eg. Mail&Guardian Online), Mohamad Bazzi writing for Newsday refers to a ‘wave of retaliatory killings’ (Newsday), and James Hider of the London Times believes that ‘the only certainty is that once [the bodies] are identified, someone will want revenge’ (Times Online). The second device is to state or imply that the security forces are closely associated with largely unaccountable Shia militias, especially the Badr Brigade. For instance, Patrick Cockburn of the UK Independent writes that ‘Some carrying out the attacks appear to belong to the 12,000-strong paramilitary police commandos’, while, in almost the same breath he adds that ‘Fear of Shia death squads, perhaps secretly controlled by the Badr Brigade, the leading Shia militia, frightens the Sunni’ (Independent); in a similar vein, the BBC claims that ‘Angry mourners at a funeral for some of those killed said they had died at the hands of police and Shia militiamen’ (BBC).

Most importantly, reports variously stress that the government, Interior Ministry and police are under sectarian Shia control. Hence, Samir Haddad, a correspondent for Islam Online, refers to the ‘dominant-Shiite newly-formed security forces’ (Islam Online), the Chicago Tribune’s Liz Sly states that Sunnis ‘accused Iraq’s security forces, now controlled by the Shiite-led government’ (Chicago Tribune), Tom Lasseter, writing for the Inquirer, claims that ‘Badr members have gained unprecedented authority’ and that the Interior Minister, who controls the nation’s police and commando forces, is a former Supreme Council official with close ties to Badr’ (Philadelphia Inquirer), the Observer’s Beaumont writes that ‘Accountability has also become more opaque since the formation of the Shia-dominated government’ (op. cit.), the BBC’s Richard Galpin states that the ‘Sunni community in particular claims it is being targeted by the Shia-dominated police force’ (BBC), Anthony Loyd for the London Times talks of ‘allegations of extensive extra-judicial killings of Sunnis by the Shia-dominated Iraqi security forces’ (Times Online) and Sinan Salaheddin of the Associated Press, states ‘The grisly finds have led Sunnis to believe that Shiite Muslims who dominate the government and the Interior Ministry are waging a quiet, deadly campaign against them’ (eg. Seattle Post-Intelligencer).

Other devices include mentioning the Interior Ministry’s claims of insurgents donning police or commando uniforms or implying that if the security forces are involved in torture and murder it is a reflection of the fact that it is composed of reconstituted members of the former state who know only a culture of violence and intimidation; this is clearly at odds with those reports that regard the security forces as entirely Shia dominated. Wilder devices talk about security forces’ frustration or blame Zarqawi for attempting to inflame sectarian tensions. Whilst all of these devices are employed in various combinations, notably absent from every account is any serious examination of the new Iraqi state or, assiduously avoided, the role of the occupying powers, leaving the most thoughtful of journalist to wonder with Beaumont whether the Iraqi state is ‘stumbling towards a policy of institutionalised torture’ or whether human-rights abuses are conducted by ‘rogue elements’ within the security apparatus (Salihee’s investigation represents the one exception, with the emphasis placed firmly on the organs of the state, supported by solid primary evidence).

Police Commandos and Disinformation Brigades

An instructive starting point for an examination of the prevailing media consensus is to consider some of the forces of the Iraqi state most closely associated with allegations of serious human rights abuses.

The majority of accusations are general. Journalists refer to the police, security forces, the National Guard or to poorly identified police commandos, but specific accusations have been made against a unit known as the Wolf Brigade. The identification of the Wolf Brigade with cases of abduction, torture and execution in Baghdad was first made on 16 May, when Mothana Harith Al-Dari, a spokesman for the AMS, stated that ‘The mass killings and the crackdown and detention campaigns in north-eastern Baghdad over the past two days by members of the Iraqi police or by an Interior Ministry special force, known as the Wolf Brigade, are part of a state terror policy’, in relation to the discoveries of the victims of extrajudicial executions noted above (Islam Online).

Within days a Knight Ridder journalist, Hannah Allam, had published under a variety of titles an article about the Wolf Brigade, highlighting their maverick tough-guy image and presenting their leader, who goes by the nom de guerre of Abul Waleed, as a devout Shiite, ‘complete with a photo of Imam Ali and religious chants programmed into his constantly ringing cell phone.’ (Knight Ridder). Allam informed readers that Waleed regarded the AMS as infidels and tossed their accusations of torture and murder into the bin. Additionally, readers learned that the unit was formed as the brainchild of Waleed in October 2004, saw its first action in Mosul after nearly two months’ training with US forces, and is behind the inhuman television programme Terrorists in the Grip of Justice, in which tortured detainees are forced to confess to a lurid array of crimes (Associated Press). However, whilst belittling charges of horrendous human-rights violations as ‘the usual complaints’, Allam made no reference to the Wolf Brigade being a special forces unit attached to the Interior Ministry.

On 9 June rightwing US think tank the Council for Foreign Relations published a paper devoted to Iraqi militias (CFR), simultaneously repeated in the New York Times. In a series of FAQ-type entries, the report reiterated many of Allam’s insights about the Wolf Brigade, as well as offering some additional tidbits:

What is the Wolf Brigade?

The most feared and effective commando unit in Iraq, experts say. Formed last October by a former three-star Shiite general and SCIRI member who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Walid, the Wolf Brigade is composed of roughly 2,000 fighters, mostly young, poor Shiites from Sadr City.

However, the paper went further in emphasising the units’ sectarian Shiite character, stating that ‘One of Badr's recent offshoots is a feared, elite commando unit linked to the Iraqi Interior Ministry called the Wolf Brigade’, and spelling out the distinction between it and other, Sunni militia-style units.

Are there any Sunni-led commando units?

Yes. At least one counterinsurgency unit is headed by a former officer of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. The Special Police Commandos, like the Wolf Brigade, have a reputation for brutality, but the group is also considered one of Iraq's most effective and well-disciplined counterinsurgency units.

Those familiar with Peter Maas’s article ‘The Way of the Commandos’, published by The New York Times Magazine just six weeks earlier, will recognise that, in fact, the Wolf Brigade bears a striking similarity to the unit he identifies as the Special Police Commandos. The Police Commandos, too, were formed in autumn 2004 and saw one of their first major commitments in Mosul in November; like the Wolf Brigade, their leader also founded an unspeakably vile television show called Terrorism in the Grip of Justice.

But there are fundamental distinctions between these units as well. The Police Commandos were founded on the initiative of then Interior Minister Falah al-Naqib, the son of a former Iraqi Chief of Staff, believed by many to have been a major CIA asset (National Review Online), under the command of his uncle, an ex-Baathist, Sunni military intelligence officer and CIA coup-plotter called Adnan Thabit. Its recruits are drawn from former members of the special forces and Republican Guard, with mixed ethnic and religious background (Washington Post), while its chain of command is said to be largely Sunni. Most importantly, the Police Commandos were formed under the experienced tutelage and oversight of veteran US counterinsurgency fighters, and from the outset conducted joint-force operations with elite and highly secretive US special-forces units (Reuters, National Review Online).

A key figure in the development of the Special Police Commandos was James Steele, a former US Army special forces operative who cut his teeth in Vietnam before moving on to direct the US military mission in El Salvador at the height of that country’s civil war. Steele was responsible for selecting and training the small units (or death squads) who were boasted to have inflicted 60% of the casualties caused in that ‘counterinsurgency’ campaign (Manwaring, El Salvador at War, 1988, p 306-8). Principally, the tens of thousands of victims were civilians.

Another US contributor was the same Steven Casteel who as the most senior US advisor within the Interior Ministry brushed off serious and well-substantiated accusations of appalling human right violations as ‘rumor and innuendo’. Like Steele, Casteel gained considerable experience in Latin America, in his case participating in the hunt for the cocaine baron Pablo Escobar in Colombia’s Drugs Wars of the 1990s, as well as working alongside local forces in Peru and Bolivia (Maas op. cit.). Whilst Casteel’s background is said to be Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the operation against Escobar was a joint intelligence effort, involving the CIA, DEA, Delta Force and a top-secret military intelligence surveillance unit knows as Centra Spike (Marihemp, SpecWarNet). The operation had no impact on Colombia’s position as the world’s major source of cocaine (which, incidentally or not, owed much to the CIA, who had became heavily involved in the trade as part of their secret funding of Nicaragua’s Contra mercenary army; for a detailed account, read the series Dark Alliance, originally published by the San Jose Mercury News), with the centre of gravity ultimately shifting to dozens of micro cartels (Houston Chronicle). However, the operation did lead to the formation of a death squad known as Los Pepes, which was to form the nucleus for Colombia’s present paramilitary death-squad umbrella organisation, the AUC, responsible for over 80 percent of the country’s most serious human-rights abuses (Colombia Journal). Whilst no official connection was ever admitted, Los Pepes relied on the intelligence data held in the fifth-floor steel vault at the US Embassy in Bogota that served as the operation’s nerve centre. Lists of the death squad’s victims rapidly came to mirror those of Escobar’s associates collated at the embassy headquarters (Cocaine.org, Cannabis News).

Casteel’s background is significant because this kind of intelligence-gathering support role and the production of death lists are characteristic of US involvement in counterinsurgency programs and constitute the underlying thread in what can appear to be random, disjointed killing sprees. Probably the best-attested example of such an operation is Indonesia during the early years of the Suharto dictatorship, when CIA officers provided the names of thousands of people, many of them members of the Indonesian Communist Party, to the army, who dutifully slaughtered them (Kathy Kadane). Similar cases can be made for the CIA supplying death lists and/or overseeing operations in Vietnam (OC Weekly), Guatemala, where death lists are known to have been compiled but were supposedly never acted upon (The Consortium), and El Salvador, where former killers have come forward to describe sharing desk space with US advisors who collected the ‘intelligence’ from ‘heavy interrogation’ but were spared details of the subsequent murders (Covert Action Quarterly). For an extensive list of countries in which the CIA has supported death squads, see the database compiled by Ralph McGehee (Serendipity).

Such centrally planned genocides are entirely consistent with what is taking place in Iraq today under the auspices of crackdowns like Operation Lightning, which make use of so-called Rapid Intrusion Brigades to make widespread, well orchestrated arrests (Financial Times). It is also consistent with what little we know about the Special Police Commandos, which was tailored to provide the Interior Ministry with a special-forces strike capability (US Department of Defense). In keeping with such a role, the Police Commando headquarters has become the hub of a nationwide command, control, communications, computer and intelligence operations centre, courtesy of the US (Defend America). Interestingly, supplying a state-of-the-art communications network to coordinate mass murder was part of the plan in Indonesia as well (Pilger, The New Rulers of the World, p 30); it is doubtless common practice.

Finally, we know that by 30 January of this year, the Police Commandos had six functioning brigades and in early April the Al-Nimr (Tiger) Brigade took over from the Al-Dhib (Wolf) Brigade in Mosul (UNAMI). Interestingly, one of the Police Commandos’ first Brigade commanders was a Shiite, apparently called Rashid al-Halafi, but Maas noted that ‘he was regarded warily by other Shiites because he held senior intelligence posts under Saddam Hussein’.

Untangling the Web

Clearly, the Wolf Brigade, though commonly treated in media reports as an autonomous entity, is actually one component of the Interior Ministry’s Special Police Commandos. Abu Walid, identified occasionally as Brig. Gen. Mohammed Qureishi, is the brigade commander, under overall command of Adnan Thabit. Another figure linked with both the Wolf Brigade and Police Commandos is Major General Rashid Flayyih, variously identified as commander of the brigade or the whole formation. If he can be identified with the brigade commander Rashid al-Halafi identified by Maas, it can be surmised that he has either been promoted or is another incarnation of Abu Walid.

Incredibly, I have not been able to find a single report written since accusations started to be made about the Wolf Brigade’s involvement in the Baghdad killings that makes their identification with the Police Commandos clear, with journalists content to loosely refer to the unit as police commandos, as though there might be all sorts of police commando units. Though this might at first seem pedantic, the lack of clarity becomes even more incredible in the case of the 10 bricklayers suffocated in the back of a police van on 10 July (San Diego Union Tribune). To my knowledge, this remains the only case in which members of the security forces have been securely identified, with a survivor who had feigned death able to provide first-hand testimony. The unit responsible was the Wolf Brigade, but this information must be deduced from a reference in one article to the victims being taken to a police station at al Nisour Square (Knight Ridder) and Beaumont’s mention that the Wolf Brigade is accused of running an interrogation centre as its Nissor Square headquarters (op. cit.). It seems that a nebulous Wolf Brigade linked to Badr, full of vengeful Shiite militiamen serves as a useful foil for allegations of ‘state terrorism’, but that when the accusations are sufficiently well-grounded, it is easier to keep it out of the spotlight for fear that a pattern of gross and systematic violations of human rights might start to emerge. The significance of this lies far beyond merely being able to expose sloppy journalistic practices, but actually reveals key characteristics of both the US imperial war machine and of the nature of their current occupation of Iraq.

With the finger of responsibility increasingly and inevitably pointing at well-organised counterinsurgency units operating from the Interior Ministry, one line of defence remains before intellectual authorship must be placed at the hands of the occupying powers. Since the election of 30 January and the transfer of office from the interim government of Ayad Allawi to the transitional one of Ibrahim Jafari in May, the mainstream media has unanimously chorused that power has fallen into the hands of Iraq’s Shia majority. Most specifically, it is repeatedly claimed that the Interior Ministry and its security forces have come under the control of SCIRI and even that the Badr Brigades now wield considerable power within the ministry, with the new Interior Minister, Bayan Jabor, described as a former Badr member. The manifestation of this control lies in the policy of de-Baathification, a process that was halted under the interim government of Ayad Allawi, but that was considered fundamental by the incoming government. The policy was actively opposed by the US administration, which feared that experienced personnel (for which, read Washington’s favourites) might be lost, especially within the security forces and intelligence apparatus (Washington Post).

According to Firas al-Nakib, a legal advisor at the Interior Ministry and a Sunni, 160 senior members of the Interior Ministry staff were rapidly dismissed and many police commanders were replaced with Shiites loyal to the Shiite bloc that won the elections (Knight Ridder). Yet, after speaking with Jabor, General Flayyih was reported to be reassured, with the former Badr member not only promising to support the Police Commandos (Financial Times), but calling for their rapid and more extensive deployment (Los Angeles Times). Flayyih’s continuing tenure is particularly noteworthy, as, though a Shiite himself, Flayyih was in charge of the suppression of the Shia uprising in Nasiriya following the first Gulf War, and is, as such, a frontrunner in any serious Shia-led policy of de-Baathification. Like Flayyih, Adnan Thabit has retained a senior position, commanding all of the Interior Ministry’s special forces (Multi-National Force - Iraq).

The issue of de-Baathification was recently addressed by Jabor, who explained that the discharge of personnel was handled by a general inspector and that recruitment was not influenced by sect (Al Mendhar). Backing up his statements, he pointed out that many senior security posts within the ministry were held by Sunnis, including that of deputy minister for intelligence affairs (also leader of the Interior Ministry’s spy service), currently held by General Hussain Kamal.

In fact, the entire intelligence establishment is a creation of the Anglo-American secret services (Los Angeles Times), which began building at least as early as the beginning of the occupation (Detroit Free Press), although it may be suspected that the process was conceived long before. The new Iraqi establishment was staffed by long-term CIA assets, such as General Mohammad Shahwani, who had been nurtured by the CIA since the late 1980s (Asia Times Online) and became director of the new National Intelligence Service (the Mukhabarat). Like Thabit and Flayyih, other old CIA hands, Shahwani had participated in attempted coups against the government of Iraq. Further agents (presumably existing intelligence assets for the most part) were recruited from Iraq’s main political groups, consisting of SCIRI, the Dawa Party, the two main Kurdish parties, the Iraqi National Congress and the Iraqi National Accord. These agents became the Collection, Management and Analysis Directorate (CMAD), whose principal job was to ‘turn raw intelligence into targets that could be used in operations’ (Detroit Free Press, op. cit.). Initially, ‘operations’ were carried out by a paramilitary unit composed of militia from the five main parties, who, under the supervision of US commanders, worked with US special forces to track down ‘insurgents’ (Washington Post). As the new Iraqi state apparatus developed, CMAD was split between the ministries of Defence and Interior, with an ‘elite corps’ creamed off to form the National Intelligence Service (Detroit Free Press, op. cit.). To oversee all three bodies, the National Intelligence Coordination Committee was established, headed, as National Security Advisor (appointed in April 2004), by Mowaffak Rubaie. This ‘leading Shiite moderate’ had been a spokesman for the Dawa Party in the 1980s when it was a serious terrorist organisation targeting Iraq, before moving on to help coordinate the Iraqi opposition from London (Asia Times Online, op. cit.). In London he worked with the Khoei Foundation, a pro-US charitable organisation that has distributed money for the CIA and is linked with the National Endowment for Democracy through Prime minister Jaafari’s advisor Laith Kuba, another long-term CIA asset (Village Voice).

These new intelligence agencies supply the data for the Interior Ministry to make arrests. A graphic and harrowing account of such arrests on 27 June 2004 was provided by UPI’s P. Mitchell Prothero, in what he describes as the ‘welcome arrival of frontier-style law enforcement’. Prothero described how local residents ‘seemed shocked’ as their doors were broken in and ‘men were dragged from their homes dishevelled and screaming’ by members of a SWAT team in central Baghdad. The raid had been planned for months by General Kamal’s intelligence agency within the Interior Ministry and the names of more than 100 detainees were checked against prepared lists (Washington Times). Prothero witnessed many of those detainees ‘worked over’ with metal batons and lengths of hose in the backs of vans, but the most serious abuse came later, within the Interior Ministry compound. On 29 June members of the Oregon National Guard swept into the grounds of the Interior Ministry and disarmed plain-clothed Iraqi policemen whom they had observed beating bound and blindfolded prisoners (Oregonian). The US soldiers began to administer first aid to the prisoners, who had also been starved of food and water for three days; many were clearly in a very serious condition. Steven Casteel was called to help deal with the situation (Boston Globe). After hours of negotiations, the soldiers unwillingly withdrew, leaving the victims in the hands of their torturers. Perhaps their ultimate fate will never be known, but as Casteel commented, ‘There’s always a pendulum between freedom and security’.

Like Thabit and Flayyih, Shahwani has retained his position under the transitional government and continues to report directly to the CIA (Seattle Times). Clearly, however, the purpose of stating or implying that unaccountable militias are behind the extrajudicial executions and/or that sectarian rivalries, especially Shia control of the Interior Ministry (which, as Beaumont correctly points out, is the centre of the horror), are to blame, is to distance the US from the almost unthinkable ongoing crimes against humanity. Comparable disinformation strategies have been employed in every counterinsurgency conflict with which the US has been involved; it is known as establishing ‘plausible deniability’. For example, in Colombia, where the US as been deeply involved for decades, paramilitary death squads are invariably described in the media as a third force in the armed conflict, despite the fact that their victims are typically civilian opponents of the government, their members are drawn directly from serving members of the armed forces and they are only able to operate with the active complicity of the army (Human Rights Watch: The “Sixth Division"). In reality, they function as part of a shadow state, which exists to implement policies that must remain unaccountable.

More specifically, in the case of Iraq, this disinformation strategy not only seems to be designed to mask the real intellectual authors of genocidal crimes, but also, increasingly, appears to be directed towards creating the very sectarian divisions that it hides behind.

Towards Balkanisation

In every country where US-backed counter insurgency operations have taken place with their attendant massacres and death squads, the conflict has existed as one dimension in a strategy of neo-colonisation. In Indonesia the communists were exterminated as part of the corporate takeover of the economy, setting the stage for the globalisation of Asia (Pilger, op. cit. p 15-44); in Colombia today, brutal death-squad massacres and the assassination of popular leaders exist to safeguard and extend the investments of foreign multinationals in oil and mining as well as as part of an ongoing process of privatisation.

In this respect, Iraq is no different. Over and above the desire to control Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the country is being subjected to enforced neo-liberal shock therapy, with wages slashed and the extensive state sector rapidly offered up for sale. Corresponding with this, is a catastrophic level of unemployment and the abandonment of service provision for the majority of the population, in short a return to typical Third World conditions (The New Standard). Such a process of economic devastation is not only unpopular, it is intolerable and there can be no doubt that most people in Iraq will oppose cuts and sell-offs and demand a restoration of employment and services. This is not a sectarian issue. To the extent to which opposition becomes effective, the leaders and activists of the movement are likely to become military targets for the state death squads, whatever guise they take.

It is hard to know exactly who the victims of the present wave of assassinations are. Certainly they have included some trade union leaders (Iraqi Federation of Workers' Trade Unions), while in the period up to March 2004 more than 1000 leading professionals and intellectuals had already been killed and thousands more had fled the country (Al Jazeera). Many of these people would have been members of the Baath party and their murders are very likely to be part of the policy of de-Baathification, which, insofar as it exists, has not targeted CIA collaborators, but will undoubtedly have included those seen as potential opponents of the new state. In passing, it is worth noting that while thousands of former teachers have been sacked, thousands more are being recruited from outside Iraq (Al Mendhar), presumably because they are either cheaper to employ (denied by the Iraqi government) or because they are more malleable to the new educational regime, which works closely with the World Bank and provides lucrative contracts to the Washington-based Creative Associates Inc (Education News). Iraq’s 30,000 new teachers have received just five days’ training and must teach religion and a history that portrays Iraq’s occupiers as saviours, rather than the former ‘anti-Western propaganda’ that might have served Iraqis better. Other victims of the death squads may be communists, the commentator Juan Cole noting that the Communist Party is so alarmed by the course of events that it is considering going underground; though he does not spell out the events that would force the party into hiding, they are not difficult to surmise (Juan Cole).

A further possibility, however, in addition to defeating a popularly backed resistance, is that the monstrous intelligence nexus created by the US in Iraq is orchestrating a strategy of ethnic cleansing as part of an effort to partition a country that might otherwise remain a regional pretender. Most of the military assaults have resulted in substantial civilian displacement (eg Washington Times), but, more worryingly, reports of families uprooting as the result of perceived sectarian violence are starting to become common. For example, in July, Mariam Fam of the Associated Press reported dozens of Shiites abandoned their homes in a poor farming community on the edge of Baghdad after receiving threats from Sunni militants that appeared in the form of typewritten flyers scattered on streets and doorsteps; prior to the Anglo-American invasion these people had shared their poverty, labour, food and intermarried with their Sunni neighbours (North Country Times). Similarly, Hala Jaber writing for the Sunday Times describes how Sunni families have fled Baghdad’s majority-Shiite Iskan neighbourhood after the killings of 22 young Sunni men, taken away by men in police uniform who arrived in vehicles bearing police markings (Times Online). A similar situation is described in Baghdad’s Ghalaliya district, where a spate of seemingly motiveless murders accelerated sharply over the summer, leaving more than 30 people, Sunnis and Shiites, dead (Los Angeles Times). The report claims that minority families there and elsewhere are selling their homes and moving to areas where they are in the majority. A similar picture is starting to emerge from other parts of the country. Jaber notes that thousands of Shiites have fled the predominantly Sunni towns of Ramadi, Falluja and Latafiya, while, according to Juan Cole, Sunnis are leaving Iraq’s deep south and Arabs, presumably of both denominations, are being forced from the Kurdish district of Kirkuk (Juan Cole).

While many in the mainstream media and Iraq’s puppet government have argued that insurgents linked to Abu Musab Zarqawi and al-Qaida are behind much of the violence, deliberately hoping to inflame sectarian divisions and incite a civil war (eg. News Day), it is interesting to note how closely their dangerous schemes correspond with the avowed aims of one of the most powerful figures in present-day Iraq. Mowaffak Rubaie, the US-installed national security advisor, promotes a vision that he calls ‘democratic regionalism’, by which Iraq would be dismembered into a loose federal system of four to six distinct provinces, with at least two Shiite provinces to the south and Baghdad as a separate district as well as the seat of federal government, nominally responsible for national defence (Newsweek). Coincidentally, such a plan is well catered for by Iraq’s new constitution (NPR), but would amount to the disintegration of the Iraqi state. A de facto civil war would undoubtedly advance this process.

The parallels with the break up of Yugoslavia are obvious. Ed Joseph of the highly establishment Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars notes that ‘the likelihood of civil war increases if, after attacks targeting a community, other members of the minority population flee’, in turn persecuting minorities in the area to which they fled (Los Angeles Times, op. cit.). However, where he sees the situation in Iraq as comparable to Bosnia, in many ways the pattern is closer to that of Kosovo, where widespread ethnic cleansing against Serbs took places under the noses of NATO observers after the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces (World Socialist Website).

In view of mounting evidence of Anglo-American involvement in the bombing campaigns targeting Iraqi civilians, notably the brief arrest of two British SAS men found with a car packed with explosives (William Bowles), it is worth speculating a little on the implementation of their wider strategy. Discounting Al-Qaida and Zarqawi in Iraq as fabrications designed for easy media consumption (Centre for Research on Globalisation), we are left with a situation in which someone is targeting Shias, mainly through the planting of bombs around mosques and at religious ceremonies, and someone is targeting Sunnis, mainly through extrajudicial executions carried out by parties that look a lot like the police but have become linked with the Shiite Badr Brigade in the popular imagination. It is impossible that the Iraqi resistance could account for this pandemic of fratricidal violence, whatever Adnan Thabit might say about insurgents in police uniforms. It is equally impossible that SCIRI and the Badr Brigade could account for much of it in a milieu dominated by CIA assets and US military forces. What is possible is that both sides of the apparent sectarian violence are run as part of a huge CIA-lead intelligence operation designed to split Iraq at the seams. I tentatively suggest that the intelligence apparatus at the Interior Ministry is contriving attacks on Sunnis and that British and US special forces in conjunction with the intelligence apparatus at the Iraqi Defence Ministry are fabricating insurgent bombings of Shias. Overseeing the entire operation is the ‘cream’ of CMAD under the direction of top-level US intelligence asset Mowaffak Rubaie, a man already experienced at participating in bombing campaigns, undoubtedly working hand in glove with the CIA and the National Security Council in the US.

False Flags, Semiotics and Vulgar Marxists

The French theorist Jean Baudrillard famously once stated that the first Gulf War did not take place. By this he did not mean that nothing happened, but that its presentation in the media consisted of an overwhelming barrage of the signs of War, which bore essentially no relationship to the annihilation of a Third World army by the most advanced military power in history. In short it was a simulation of war. This was perhaps the most extreme example of what Baudrilliard referred to as the ‘ecstacy of communication’, that in our Information Age, concepts spin at such a rate that their outlines become lost and their original meanings are replaced with empty alternatives.

Fifteen years later, the same charges can be levelled against the recent Iraq ‘War’ and the country’s subsequent occupation. Most importantly, I believe that a process akin to that Baudrillard highlighted is being actively employed to simulate a civil war in Iraq. False-flag intelligence operations are aimed at sowing seeds of a sectarian strife that was largely non-existent prior to the invasion. Thus, even many Sunni Iraqis are coming to believe that the well-organised death squads run from the CIA-controlled intelligence hub are actually the Badr Brigade they often claim to be; and thus British SAS men in Arab disguise plant bombs at Shia religious festivals to be blamed on fanatical Wahabi Sunni ‘insurgents’.

Whether such tactics succeed in provoking further, autonomous acts of violence directed against the civilian population is much less significant than the impact they are able to exert within the media. This Anglo-American intelligence operation acts as a factory churning out the signs of Civil War: a ‘wave of tit-for-tat sectarian violence’ and the consequent ethnic cleansing. The signs are produced to be picked up by the media and spun and spun until nothing is left but a nebulous Civil War with no internal logic or structure, with the occupying forces as powerless to intervene as they were in the Balkans while Iraq splits into Rubiae’s desired four to six autonomous provinces. Those few journalists, like Yasser Salihee and Steven Vincent, who break the mould and start to investigate the actual authorship of extrajudicial killings themselves become victims.

When one former CIA operative candidly claimed that ‘Intelligence services are the heart and soul of a new country’ (Washington Post)), they were inadvertently expressing a position that Noam Chomsky might call ‘vulgar Marxist’. What they were actually confessing is that the essence of a state is the organisation of violence as the ultimate coercive measure and that the intelligence apparatus functions as its brain. Little wonder then that the US is so closely involved with intelligence services the world over, or that both coup d’états and savage repressions of sectors of the population deemed opposed to US interests have emanated from the offices of these same services.

To penetrate the media smokescreen of spontaneous, uncontrollable violence and understand the role of intelligence operations in the creation of a beholden, occupied client state or series of statelets is fundamental to understanding the processes in Iraq today. It is also fundamental to recognising that the presence of Anglo-American forces in Iraq does not merely exacerbate the present violence; in Iraq we are the violence.

Max Fuller is the author of ‘For Iraq, the Salvador Option Become Reality’ published by the Centre for Research on Globalisation. He can be contacted at Max.Fuller@talktalk.net. His website is http://www.thecatsdream.com/blog

Carl Oglesby, (1976): Tyranny is Terror

2006-01-10T11:02:00.000-08:00

from Carl Oglesby, The Cowboy and Indian War (1976, 1977)

Tyranny is Terror

Tyranny was never a remedy for terror. Tyranny is terror. Tyranny and terror promote and multiply each other so well because each is the other’s only possible “legitimation.” But if they are actually the same, as any Socrates could show, then they cannot “legitimate” each other. The choice between terror and totalitarianism is a choice that can only be made – can only be identified as a choice—by terrorists and tyrants. The democrat, the republican, and the independent among us will not be so quick to see terror and tyranny as opposite alternatives, but only as two sides of one coin, a single composite choice against liberty and humanity. The authentic rejection of terror mandates the rejection of tyranny. The authentic rejection of tyranny mandates the rejection of terror. There is no way to defend the democracy by the use of antidemocratic means. There is no antirepublican method corresponding to a republican purpose. There is no furtherance of national and personal and social independence through submission to national police controls. The state cannot at the same time uphold the law and trample it underfoot.

(emphasis in original)

Paul .Craig. Roberts: A Gestapo Administration

2006-01-02T17:34:00.000-08:00

Paul Craig Roberts advances the discussion in two interesting ways. First, he suggests the reason for the warrantless wiretapping is to blackmail the Democrats into silence while Bush continues the Iraq war and his power grab. I don't think this holds water since the Democrats are handcuffed in other ways not least because of election fraud including but not limited to electronic voting. As a result Bush has sufficient control over Congress. Much more likely a motive for the warrantles wiretapping is to control dissent through total information awareness and to create prosecutable victims to justify the "war on terror."

Roberts is more on target in pointing to the reason for the leak investigation.

Why is the Justice (sic) Department investigating the leak of Bush's illegal activity instead of the illegal activity committed by Bush? Is the purpose to stonewall Congress' investigation of Bush's illegal spying? By announcing a Justice (sic) Department investigation, the Bush administration positions itself to decline to respond to Congress on the grounds that it would compromise its own investigation into national security matters.

Also, the connection Roberts makes with Hitler who intimidated the courts into agreeeing that he was the law is of course dead on. As well as his hints that 9/11 was an inside job and unless we as a nation recognize it in time, we're in danger of undergoing the next one -- the one Rumsfeld calls 10/12. --RB

January 2, 2006

Bush's Witchhunt Against Truth-Tellers
http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts01022006.html
A Gestapo Administration
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Caught in gratuitous and illegal spying on American citizens, the Bush administration has defended its illegal activity and set the Justice (sic) Department on the trail of the person or persons who informed the New York Times of Bush's violation of law. Note the astounding paradox: The Bush administration is caught red-handed in blatant illegality and responds by trying to arrest the patriots who exposed the administration's illegal behavior.

Bush has actually declared it treasonous to reveal his illegal behavior! His propagandists, who masquerade as news organizations, have taken up the line: To reveal wrong-doing by the Bush administration is to give aid and comfort to the enemy.

Compared to Spygate, Watergate was a kindergarden picnic. The Bush administration's lies, felonies, and illegalities have revealed it to be a criminal administration with a police state mentality and police state methods. Now Bush and his attorney general have gone the final step and declared Bush to be above the law. Bush aggressively mimics Hitler's claim that defense of the realm entitles him to ignore the rule of law.

Bush's acts of illegal domestic spying are gratuitous because there are no valid reasons for Bush to illegally spy. The Foreign Intelligence Services Act gives Bush all the power he needs to spy on terrorist suspects. All the administration is required to do is to apply to a secret FISA court for warrants. The Act permits the administration to spy first and then apply for a warrant, should time be of the essence. The problem is that Bush has totally ignored the law and the court.

Why would President Bush ignore the law and the FISA court? It is certainly not because the court in its three decades of existence was uncooperative. According to attorney Martin Garbus (New York Observer, 12-28-05), the secret court has issued more warrants than all federal district judges combined, only once denying a warrant.

Why, then, has the administration created another scandal for itself on top of the WMD, torture, hurricane, and illegal detention scandals?

There are two possible reasons.

One reason is that the Bush administration is being used to concentrate power in the executive. The old conservative movement, which honors the separation of powers, has been swept away. Its place has been taken by a neoconservative movement that worships executive power.

The other reason is that the Bush administration could not go to the FISA secret court for warrants because it was not spying for legitimate reasons and, therefore, had to keep the court in the dark about its activities.

What might these illegitimate reasons be? Could it be that the Bush administration used the spy apparatus of the US government in order to influence the outcome of the presidential election?

Could we attribute the feebleness of the Democrats as an opposition party to information obtained through illegal spying that would subject them to blackmail?

These possible reasons for bypassing the law and the court need to be fully investigated and debated. No administration in my lifetime has given so many strong reasons to oppose and condemn it as has the Bush administration. Nixon was driven from office because of a minor burglary of no consequence in itself. Clinton was impeached because he did not want the embarrassment of publicly acknowledging that he engaged in adulterous sex acts in the Oval Office. In contrast, Bush has deceived the public and Congress in order to invade Iraq, illegally detained Americans, illegally tortured detainees, and illegally spied on Americans. Bush has upheld neither the Constitution nor the law of the land. A majority of Americans disapprove of what Bush has done; yet, the Democratic Party remains a muted spectator.

Why is the Justice (sic) Department investigating the leak of Bush's illegal activity instead of the illegal activity committed by Bush? Is the purpose to stonewall Congress' investigation of Bush's illegal spying? By announcing a Justice (sic) Department investigation, the Bush administration positions itself to decline to respond to Congress on the grounds that it would compromise its own investigation into national security matters.

What will the federal courts do? When Hitler challenged the German judicial system, it collapsed and accepted that Hitler was the law. Hitler's claims were based on nothing but his claims, just as the claim for extra-legal power for Bush is based on nothing but memos written by his political appointees.

The Bush administration, backed by the neoconservative Federalist Society, has brought the separation of powers, the foundation of our political system, to crisis. The Federalist Society, an organization of Republican lawyers, favors more "energy in the executive." Distrustful of Congress and the American people, the Federalist Society never fails to support rulings that concentrate power in the executive branch of government. It is a paradox that conservative foundations and individuals have poured money for 23 years into an organization that is inimical to the separation of powers, the foundation of our constitutional system.

September 11, 2001, played into neoconservative hands exactly as the 1933 Reichstag fire played into Hitler's hands. Fear, hysteria, and national emergency are proven tools of political power grabs. Now that the federal courts are beginning to show some resistance to Bush's claims of power, will another terrorist attack allow the Bush administration to complete its coup?

Paul Craig Roberts has held a number of academic appointments and has contributed to numerous scholarly publications. He served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His graduate economics education was at the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Oxford University. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions. He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

B&K Christison: A 2006 US/Israeli War Against Iran Inevitable?

2006-01-01T16:10:00.000-08:00

http://www.counterpunch.org/christison12292005.html

December 29, 2005

It's More Important Than Halting Nuclear Proliferation
Let's Stop a US/Israeli War on Iran
By BILL and KATHLEEN CHRISTISON
Former CIA analysts

The peace movements of the entire world should be in crisis mode right now, working non-stop to prevent the U.S. and Israel from starting a war against Iran. (See the James Petras article in CounterPunch on December 24, 2005 titled Iran in the Crosshairs for the best summary of the present situation.) The reckless and unnecessary dangers arising from such a war are so obvious that one wonders why normal political forces in the two aggressor countries -- both of whom love to glorify themselves as democracies -- would not prevent such a war from happening.

But the "normal political forces" in both the U.S. and Israel have become badly distorted. Democracy has been seriously undermined in both. The cowboy-like personalities and aggressive tendencies of both countries' leaders tend to feed on each other. Domestic political difficulties and coming elections in both countries probably add to the macho inclination of the ruling elites to use force to remove any problems facing them. The glue binding these tendencies together is the ever-strengthening institutional link between defense establishments and military-industrial complexes in both countries, as well as, in the U.S, the growing power and influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) over both major political parties. The entire mix increases the probability, against all common sense, that this absurd war will actually happen.

Nothing else more dangerous to the world, to the Middle East, to the oppressed Palestinians, or to the true interests of the United States is happening today -- anywhere. Americans who do not want an eruption of a new world war, started by our own government, ought to be strongly lobbying the Bush administration and all members of Congress against supporting any military action by the U.S. and Israel against Iran. Globally, people who oppose such a war should be lobbying their own governments in similar fashion.

Background

It is worthwhile to discuss briefly the broader context of why a war with Iran today seems a real possibility. During his all-out public relations effort in late 2005 to regain support for his policies in the Middle East, Bush has made it clear that he plans to continue his drive for complete victory in the "War on Terrorism," without making significant changes in his own, very aggressive, foreign policies. Those policies will make this planet a less safe, more unjust place to live for most people around the world, as well as for most of us living in the U.S. The special relationship between the U.S. and Israel has long played an important role in these aggressive policies.

Outside the United States, it is widely understood that one of the true motives -- not the exclusive motive but a real and significant one -- behind the Bush administration's 2003 invasion of Iraq was the desire of the neocons in Washington to conquer Iraq in order to benefit Israel. Although a few of the big-name neocons (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Lewis "Scooter" Libby) have left high-visibility positions for various reasons, many remain, and it is clear that Bush himself, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice have taken as their own the main tenets of neocon beliefs.

Inside the U.S., on the other hand, the pressure of the neocons for war on Israel's behalf, or any hint that Bush himself participates in that pressure, is hardly ever mentioned. This taboo on discussing the Israeli link to the war in Iraq, enforced by the threat of being labeled anti-Semitic, introduces major distortions into practically every effort to examine and change policies that are causing massive hatred of the U.S. around the world.

But right now, three of the long-existing "problems" in the Middle East (i.e., situations that have been made problems largely by our own actions) have reached critical stages that may, if Washington's policies do not change quite quickly, result in our losing even the remnants of stability and peace that remain in that region today. The world could face instead nuclear warfare or, at a minimum, a practically unending "clash of civilizations" and conventional warfare at a much higher level than exists now. The first, and the most important right now, of the three problems is the main subject of this article: the problem that arises from the determined U.S. and Israeli policy of preventing Iran from ever acquiring nuclear weapons. The second and third problems, also situations brought on by the U.S. itself, have to do with Syria and the Palestinians. In the long run, they are also very important, but they are less urgent for now. These other problems will be considered briefly at the end of this article.

As was the case with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, one of the underlying causes of all these "problems" in the Middle East has been the success of the neocons in persuading the Bush administration to support aggressively the goals of the Israeli government throughout the area. And here again, the fear of being charged with anti-Semitism causes many Americans quietly to accept the taboo on discussing the Israeli link to the Bush administration's foreign policies. This is an absurd situation. Criticizing Israeli (or U.S.) policies and urging specific changes in those policies is not anti-Semitic (or anti-American). The arrogance of anyone who suggests the contrary is appalling. The following paragraphs contain suggestions on how we should work to remedy those aspects of this absurdity that bear on Iran and nuclear weapons.

What should be done to change U.S. policy on Iran's nuclear program?

First of all, don't fall into the trap of accepting Iran's public claims that it is not attempting to acquire nuclear weapons. Many of the nations that now have such weapons made similar claims while they were developing the weapons. Israel did so throughout the first half of the 1960s, engaging in elaborate subterfuges even when dealing with U.S. inspectors who occasionally came looking for weapons work. The Israeli claims were so much garbage (see Israeli author Avner Cohen's book, Israel and the Bomb). Then, after it acquired its first nuclear explosive device almost 40 years ago now, Israel simply adopted a well publicized policy of ambiguity and stopped talking publicly about whether it had any weapons. India and Pakistan also both claimed not to be working on weapons when in fact they were. Their claims were garbage too, which they quickly threw away once they joined the nuclear club and possessed their own deterrent. Iran almost certainly intends to do the same, and its public claims to the contrary are also almost certainly worthless.

The principal point to start with is that, unless the U.S. and Israel (and other nations as well) all agree to work seriously toward eliminating their own nuclear weapons, any Iranian government will consider that it has as much right as the rest of us to such weapons. Essentially, even if Iran, under pressure, were to sign new agreements, now or in the future, to forgo nuclear weapons, the new agreements would be meaningless unless the U.S., Israel, and other nuclear nations ended their own monumental hypocrisy of insisting that they can keep and expand their nuclear arsenals, while non-nuclear nations may not acquire such arsenals. In the eyes of most Muslims around the world and many other people too, Iran, with a population of close to 70 million, has at least as much right as Israel, with a population less than one-tenth as large, to have nuclear weapons

Most supporters of the global peace movements by definition oppose the solving of international problems through warfare, and they also oppose the further proliferation of nuclear weapons. Most are also aware that the critical bargain reached in the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) -- the bargain that made the treaty possible -- was a trade-off: the acceptance of continued non-nuclear-weapons status by states without those weapons, in return for the simultaneous agreement by states possessing nuclear weapons to pursue good-faith negotiations on nuclear, and complete and general, disarmament. This latter provision had no teeth, and certainly many "realists" in the U.S. foreign policy establishment expected that it would not and could not be enforced. Nevertheless, the existence of this provision was necessary to the NPT's ratification by numerous countries, and it gives any state dissatisfied with progress toward nuclear disarmament an excuse to abrogate or ignore the treaty.

Most people will not bother to make the niceties of international law an issue in this matter, but the question of which is more important, stopping the further proliferation of nuclear weapons to Iran or stopping our own side from instigating a war against Iran, is vital. The answer should be clear: The single most urgent objective we should have right now is to prevent a war, possibly nuclear, from being started by the U.S. and/or Israel against Iran. To repeat, such a war would be disastrous, and we should be doing whatever we can, with the highest possible priority, to prevent it from ever happening.

Every peace activist on the globe ought to be in the streets and elsewhere lobbying in support of something very simple: do not attack Iran, even if this means allowing Iran to develop its own nuclear weapons. We should put out the message that it is simply not worth a war, with consequences impossible to foresee, to prevent Iran from obtaining such weapons. From 1945 until we invaded Iraq in 2003, we never once took military action to prevent other nations from developing nuclear weapons. We relied instead on deterrence and containment (to prevent other nations from using such weapons after they had been developed). These may not be perfect policies, but they have a successful track record and can probably be applied more successfully than other policies to subnational groups as well as nation-states. The point is that these are still better policies than the recklessness of preemption, and we should use these policies in lobbying against U.S involvement of any kind in military actions or coup attempts against Iran. We should also very definitely support an effort to tie future U.S. aid to Israel to Israel's not engaging in military action against Iran.

We are talking here about supporting (by our silence), or opposing (by vociferous lobbying), what could become major, serious warfare -- warfare that could easily become global, and also could easily cause greater difficulties for the peoples of the Middle East than any they have yet faced from U.S. policies. With an election campaign intensifying the political volatilities of Israeli politics, with possibly fast-moving new uncertainties and vulnerabilities arising among both Republicans and Democrats jousting for advantage in a U.S. election year, and with a new, inexperienced president in Iran who, so far at least, believes aggressive speech strengthens his political position, the dangers in the situation are evident. As each week passes and no movement occurs anywhere -- particularly in Washington -- to reduce tensions by changing policies, the risk grows of a mistake that will lead to new hostilities, and possibly nuclear warfare. How many Iranians might we and the Israelis kill? How many Israelis might die? How many Americans?

How should the U.S. change its policies with respect to Syria?

The issues of Syria and Palestine are related to U.S. policy toward Iran. Policy on Syria today is to put constant pressure on that country's ruler, Bashar al-Assad, with the ultimate objective of ousting and replacing him with someone (not yet named by the Americans) who would be even more subservient to U.S. and Israeli desires. Assad himself has moved a considerable way toward subservience, giving the U.S. considerable help on intelligence matters and accepting certain U.S. prisoners "rendered" to his regime for purposes of torture, but the U.S., unsatisfied, keeps intensifying the pressure. The U.S. and Israel have succeeded in making it more difficult for Syria to provide support for the Palestinian resistance against Israel's occupation, but Damascus still provides some refuge for Hezbollah personnel.

The recent assassinations of anti-Syrian leaders in Lebanon have provided new opportunities for the Bush administration to ratchet up its criticism of Syria still further, although the evidence of Syrian involvement in the assassinations is weak. It is at least possible that other groups, such as the Israel's Mossad or the CIA, are responsible.

Whatever the truth behind events in Lebanon, the events themselves could offer a U.S. president who is in some trouble at home the possibility of a low-cost, low-risk foreign policy victory if he could pull off, perhaps with the help of Mossad, a quick covert action that ousted Assad. Act II of a grand show might then proceed -- another U.S. occupation installed, another nation in the Middle East "democratized," elections held a year or two later and a puppet government set up, step-by-step takeovers of the economy implemented by U.S. and Israeli interests, further isolation of the Palestinians from other Arabs -- all in all, another great victory for the U.S-Israeli partnership.

Or so Bush, at least, might believe. In reality, the situation might turn into another morass like Iraq. But months might pass and the U.S. congressional election of November 2006 might be history before we knew that for sure. Might not a man like Bush who revels in chance-taking consider this a pretty good gamble? Meanwhile, how many Syrians would we kill? How many badly wounded Americans would come home to a questionable quality of life because bulletproof vests saved their lives? If Israeli military units moved into Syria (to help us, of course), how many Israelis would die?

We should all be lobbying members of Congress not to cast any votes in favor of aggressive U.S. policies toward Syria. Such votes cannot help, and will only take resources from, a majority of the world's peoples and a majority of Americans. Syria (and Lebanon) are not places where the United States benefits in any way from being a global policeman. While the neocons and probably some present top Israeli officials do see benefits to be gained from U.S. intervention in Syria, other senior and many ordinary Israelis do not. We also should urge members of Congress to tie further aid to Israel to Israel's not becoming involved in any military actions against Syria.

How should the U.S. change its policies with respect to the Palestinians?

We should make it as clear as we possibly can to members of Congress that the Palestine-Israel problem is the most central long-term issue to the peoples of the Middle East. Most Arab leaders have been so co-opted by the U.S. that they no longer object to our support for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, but the peoples of the area are a different story. They do care about and object strenuously to that oppression.

Regardless of what happens anywhere in the Middle East, we will never end the "War on Terrorism" without, first, a solution to the Palestine-Israel issue that provides as much justice to the Palestinians as to the Israelis. Although many supporters of Israel try to compare the several-centuries-long U.S. conquest of American Indians to the Israeli attempt to conquer the Palestinians, there is no valid comparison. Quite apart from the immorality of any attempt to emulate the U.S. atrocity against its indigenous population, there are practical reasons why the comparison cannot be made. The population balances, for instance, are entirely different; there are proportionately far more Palestinians than there were American Indians.

Nevertheless, Israeli and U.S. policy in the West Bank, semi-hidden by a bogus withdrawal from Gaza, continues to seek permanent conquest of more and more territory. The daily injustices and cruelties imposed by Israel and the U.S. on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are today worse than they have been in the previous 38 years of occupation. This is not only a major human rights issue facing the United States. It is also a very large cause of the hatred against the U.S. throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.

What is new in the last few months is Israeli intensification of settlement activity in the West Bank, particularly in East Jerusalem; intensification of land-confiscation (with no recompense to Palestinians); a speed-up in construction of the separation wall and of new "Israeli-citizens-only" roads, both of which also require more land-confiscation; more demolitions of Palestinian houses; and new, harsh Israeli measures of other types aimed specifically at forcing Palestinians out of areas, in which they have lived for generations, in and near Jerusalem.

All of this takes place with little Western media attention; the media devoted considerably more attention to the carefully televised "suffering" of the relatively few Israeli settlers forced to move from their luxurious homes in Gaza. The Israelis, with heavy U.S. financing, are busily establishing more "facts on the ground" that will make any peaceful solution providing equal justice to both sides less possible. That does not mean that Israel will "win." Given the determination and inexhaustibility (and large numbers) of Palestinians, it just means more terrorism, killing, and cruelty on both sides. It is a shocking waste of lives, and the U.S. is prolonging it by its one-sided support of Israel. Let's put it baldly. U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine is simply immoral in its one-sidedness. It should take no one who investigates what is actually happening to Palestinians in the West Bank more than 30 seconds to decide that the oppression and cruelties that can be seen there daily should be stopped. Here too, further U.S. aid to Israel should be directly tied to Israel's stopping the oppression and cruelties to Palestinians.

The position we should take in lobbying members of Congress is simple and obvious: Stop the one-sidedness. It is a blot that will stain all our other activities and policies in the Middle East, and probably elsewhere, for years to come. The longer we avoid changing this situation, the larger the blot will become.

Conclusion

All of these issues -- Iran, Syria, and Palestine-Israel -- are interrelated, and each issue enhances the perception around the world that the U.S. is hypocritical, oppressive, and interested only in advancing Israel's interests. All grow out of the one-sided U.S. support for Israel, and none will be resolved without a change in the U.S.-Israeli relationship. To put it baldly again, the widespread perception of the U.S. as immoral and unjust interferes in a quite serious way with the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Neither we nor Israel "wins" if U.S. policy continues on the same path.

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis.

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for 30 years. She is the author of Perceptions of Palestine and The Wound of Dispossession.

They both can be reached at christison@counterpunch.org.

James Petras:Imminet War: Iran in the Crosshairs -- the Israeli Lobby

2005-12-28T10:58:00.000-08:00

Seconding Jeff Blankfort below, I’ll add that James Petras’s article is easily the best and most closely reasoned I’ve seen on, among other things, PM Ariel Sharon’s use of misleading claims about Iran’s nuclear program as a powerful issue in the run up to February elections in Israel. Petras details how the Israeli lobby, working with the permanent war faction of the US government, is apparently inexorably moving the US and/or Israel, to active military action in Iran. If this were a normal government we would say, as Petras does, that this risks wider Middle East turmoil and war, not to mention the bulk of the world’s oil supplies and even less consequential, apparently, to the policy makers, hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives. But for the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld clique, such ends are exactly their goal: besides war, and its resultant effect on national priorities, they have no other agenda.

Petras suggests that US strategy is to maneuver in such a way as to bring Iran’s nuclear energy program before the UN in early 2006 and then (as Scott Ritter has pointed out on Democracy Now) in the face of UN stalemate, to take what they deem to be appropriate military action. (Note that current right wing governments in France and Germany serve the interests of the war lobby.)

9/11 and more terror
When Petras mentions the likelihood of increased terror attacks in the US and Europe that would likely occur in the event of US/Israeli military attacks on Iran, those of us who believe that 9/11 was an inside job (not to mention London, Jordan, Madrid, Bali, etc,) cannot help but be put in mind of the changed political atmosphere that is very likely one of the objectives of US/Israeli policy. While the current climate would not seem conducive to a repeat of a 9/11-style attack in the US (what Rumsfeld calls 10/12), once a wider war is jump-started in the Middle East in 2006, another inside job is more feasible. -- Ronald

Jeff Blankfort writes:

This is an important article by James Petras which challenges the notion
that "official" Washington and Israel's global an security interests are
one and the same. That the push for war against Iran by the scores of
pro-Israel lobbying groups has been totally ignored by the anti-war
movement as their push for war against Iraq was equally ignored and,
since, vigorously denied, is unfortunately, another testament to how
deeply support for Israel or the fear of provoking "anti-Semitism" by
its "leadership" and within its ranks has left the movement, such as it
is under the circumstances, not only useless, but an impediment to
bringing the issues that Petras describes below to the American people.

Jeff's excerpts from the Petras article:

"The principal result will be a huge escalation of war throughout the
Middle East. Iran, a country of 70 million, with several times the
military forces that Iraq possessed and with highly motivated and
committed military and paramilitary forces could be expected to cross
into Iraq. Iraqi Shiites sympathetic to or allied with Iran would most
likely break their ties with Washington and go into combat. US military
bases, troops and clients would be under fierce attack. US military
casualties would multiply. All troop withdrawal plans would be
disrupted. The 'Iraqization' strategy would disintegrate....

"Here in the United States there are few if any influential organized
lobbies challenging the pro-war Israel lobby either from the perspective
of working for coexistence in the Middle East or even in defending US
national interests when they diverge from Israel. Although numerous
former diplomats, generals, intelligence officials, Reformed Jews,
retired National Security advisers and State Department professionals
have publicly denounced the Iran war agenda and even criticized the
Israel First lobbies, their newspaper ads and media interviews have not
been backed by any national political organization that can compete for
influence in the White House and Congress.

"As we draw closer to a major confrontation with Iran and Israeli
officials set short-term deadlines for igniting a Middle East
conflagration, it seems that we are doomed to learn from future
catastrophic losses that Americans must organize to defeat political
lobbies based on overseas allegiances."

http://www.counterpunch.com/petras12242005.html

December 24/25, 2005
Israel's War Deadline: Iran in the Crosshairs

By JAMES PETRAS

Never has an imminent war been so loudly and publicly advertised as
Israel's forthcoming military attack against Iran. When the Israeli
Military Chief of Staff, Daniel Halutz, was asked how far Israel was
ready to go to stop Iran's nuclear energy program, he said "Two thousand
kilometers" ï¿½ the distance of an air assault.

More specifically Israeli military sources reveal that Israel's current
and probably next Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered Israel's armed
forces to prepare for air strikes on uranium enrichment sites in Iran
According to the London Times the order to prepare for attack went
through the Israeli defense ministry to the Chief of Staff. During the
first week in December, "sources inside the special forces command
confirmed that 'G' readiness ï¿½ the highest state ï¿½ for an operation was
announced" (Times, December 11, 2005).

On December 9, Israeli Minister of Defense, Shaul Mofaz, affirmed that
in view of Teheran's nuclear plans, Tel Aviv should "not count on
diplomatic negotiations but prepare other solutions". In early December,
Ahron Zoevi Farkash, the Israeli military intelligence chief told the
Israeli parliament (Knesset) that "if by the end of March, the
international community is unable to refer the Iranian issue to the
United Nations Security Council, then we can say that the international
effort has run its course".

In other words, if international diplomatic negotiations fail to comply
with Israel's timetable, Israel will unilaterally, militarily attack
Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu, leader of the Likud Party and candidate for
Prime Minister, stated that if Sharon did not act against Iran, "then
when I form the new Israeli government (after the March 2006 elections)
we'll do what we did in the past against Saddam's reactor." In June 1981
Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq.

Even the pro-Labor newspaper, Haaretz, while disagreeing with the time
and place of Netanyahu's pronouncements, agreed with its substance.
Haaretz criticized "(those who) publicly recommend an Israeli military
option" because it "presents Israel as pushing (via powerful pro-Israel
organizations in the US) the United States into a major war." However,
Haaretz adds "Israel must go about making its preparations quietly and
securely ï¿½ not at election rallies." (Haaretz, December 6, 2005).
Haaretz's position, like that of the Labor Party, is that Israel not
advocate war against Iran before multi-lateral negotiations are over and
the International Atomic Energy Agency makes a decision.

Israeli public opinion apparently does not share the political elite's
plans for a military strike against Iran's nuclear program. A survey in
the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, reported by Reuters (December
16, 2005) shows that 58 per cent of the Israelis polled believed the
dispute over Iran's nuclear program should be handled diplomatically
while only 36 per cent said its reactors should be destroyed in a
military strike.

All top Israeli officials have pronounced the end of March, 2006, as the
deadline for launching a military assault on Iran. The thinking behind
this date is to heighten the pressure on the US to force the sanctions
issue in the Security Council. The tactic is to blackmail Washington
with the "war or else" threat, into pressuring Europe (namely Great
Britain, France, Germany and Russia) into approving sanctions. Israel
knows that its acts of war will endanger thousands of American soldiers
in Iraq, and it knows that Washington (and Europe) cannot afford a third
war at this time.

The end of March date also coincides with the IAEA report to the UN on
Iran's nuclear energy program. Israeli policymakers believe that their
threats may influence the report, or at least force the kind of
ambiguities, which can be exploited by its overseas supporters to
promote Security Council sanctions or justify Israeli military action.

A March date also focuses the political activities of the pro-Israel
organizations in the United States. The major pro-Israel lobbies have
lined up a majority in the US Congress and Senate to push for the UN
Security Council to implement economic sanctions against Iran or,
failing that, endorse Israeli "defensive" action.

On the side of the Israeli war policy are practically all the major and
most influential Jewish organizations, the pro-Israeli lobbies, their
political action committees, a sector of the White House, a majority of
subsidized Congressional representatives and state, local and party
leaders. On the other side are sectors of the Pentagon, State
Department, a minority of Congressional members, a majority of public
opinion, a minority of American Jews and the majority of active and
retired military commanders who have served or are serving in Iraq.

Most discussion in the US on Israel's war agenda has been dominated by
the pro-Israeli organizations that transmit the Israeli state positions.
The Jewish weekly newspaper, Forward, has reported a number of Israeli
attacks on the Bush Administration for not acting more aggressively on
behalf of Israel's policy. According to the Forward, "Jerusalem is
increasingly concerned that the Bush Administration is not doing enough
to block Teheran from acquiring nuclear weapons" (December 9, 2005).

Further stark differences occurred during the semi-annual strategic
dialog between Israeli and US security officials, in which the Israelis
opposed a US push for regime change in Syria, fearing a possible, more
radical Islamic regime. Israeli officials also criticized the US for
forcing Israel to agree to open the Rafah border crossing and upsetting
their stranglehold on the economy in Gaza.

Predictably the biggest Jewish organization in the US, the Conference of
Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations immediately echoed the
Israeli state line. Malcolm Hoenlan, President of the Conference,
lambasted Washington for a "failure of leadership on Iran" and
"contracting the issue to Europe" (Forward, December 9, 2005). He went
on to attack the Bush Administration for not following Israel's demands
by delaying referral of Iran to the UN Security Council for sanction.
Hoenlan then turned on French, German and British negotiators accusing
them of "appeasement and weakness", and of not having a "game plan for
decisive action" ï¿½ presumably for not following Israel's 'sanction or
bomb them' game plan.

The role of AIPAC, the Conference and other pro-Israeli organizations as
transmission belts for Israel's war plans was evident in their November
28, 2005 condemnation of the Bush Administration agreement to give
Russia a chance to negotiate a plan under which Iran would be allowed to
enrich uranium for non-military purposes under international
supervision. AIPAC's rejection of negotiations and demands for an
immediate confrontation were based on the specious argument that it
would "facilitate Iran's quest for nuclear weapons" ï¿½ an argument which
flies in the face of all known intelligence data (including Israel's)
which says Iran is at least 3 to 10 years away from even approaching
nuclear weaponry.

AIPAC's unconditional and uncritical transmission of Israeli demands and
criticism is usually clothed in the rhetoric of US interests or security
in order to manipulate US policy. AIPAC chastised the Bush regime for
endangering US security. By relying on negotiations, AIPAC accused the
Bush Administration of "giving Iran yet another chance to manipulate
(sic) the international community" and "pose a severe danger to the
United States" (Forward, Dec. 9, 2005).

Leading US spokesmen for Israel opposed President Bush's instruction to
his Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khaklilzad, to open a dialog with Iran's
Ambassador to Iraq. In addition, Israel's official "restrained" reaction
to Russia's sale to Teheran of more than a billion dollars worth of
defensive anti-aircraft missiles, which might protect Iran from an
Israeli air strike, was predictably echoed by the major Jewish
organizations in the US.

Pushing the US into a confrontation with Iran, via economic sanctions
and military attack has been a top priority for Israel and its
supporters in the US for more than a decade (Jewish Times/ Jewish
Telegraph Agency, Dec. 6, 2005). In line with its policy of forcing a US
confrontation with Iran, AIPAC, the Israeli PACs (political action
committees) and the Conference of Presidents have successfully lined up
a majority of Congress people to challenge what they describe as the
"appeasement" of Iran.

Representative Illeana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Florida), who has the dubious
distinction of being a collaborator with Cuban exile terrorist groups
and unconditional backer of Israel's war policy, is chairwoman of the US
House of Representative Middle East subcommittee. From that platform she
has denounced "European appeasement and arming the terrorist regime in
Teheran". She boasted that her Iran sanctions bill has the support of 75
per cent of the members of Congress and that she is lining up additional
so-sponsors.

Despite pro-Israeli attacks on US policy for its 'weakness' on Iran,
Washington has moved as aggressively as circumstances permit. Facing
European opposition to an immediate confrontation (as AIPAC and Israeli
politicians demand) Washington supports European negotiations but
imposes extremely limiting conditions, namely a rejection of the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, which allows uranium enrichment for peaceful
purposes.

The European "compromise" of forcing Iran to turn over the enrichment
process to a foreign country (Russia), is not only a violation of its
sovereignty, but is a policy that no other country using nuclear energy
practices. Given this transparently unacceptable "mandate", it is clear
that Washington's 'support for negotiations' is a device to provoke an
Iranian rejection, and a means of securing Europe's support for a
Security Council referral for international sanctions.

Despite the near unanimous support and widespread influence of the major
Jewish organizations, 20 per cent of American Jews do not support Israel
in its conflict with the Palestinians. Even more significantly, 61 per
cent of Jews almost never talk about Israel or defend Israel in
conversation with non-Jews (Jerusalem Post, Dec 1, 2005). Only 29 per
cent of Jews are active promoters of Israel. The Israel First crowd
represents less than a third of the Jewish community. In fact, there is
more opposition to Israel among Jews than there is in the US Congress.
Having said that, however, most Jewish critics of Israel are not
influential in the big Jewish organizations and the Israel lobby,
excluded from the mass media and mostly intimidated from speaking out,
especially on Israel's war preparations against Iran.

The Myth of the Iranian Nuclear Threat

The Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff, Daniel Halutz, has
categorically denied that Iran represents an immediate nuclear threat to
Israel, let along the United States. According to Haaretz (12/14/05),
Halutz stated that it would take Iran time to be able to produce a
nuclear bomb ï¿½ which he estimated might happen between 2008 and 2015.

Israel's Labor Party officials do not believe that Iran represents an
immediate nuclear threat and that the Sharon government and the Likud
war propaganda is an electoral ploy. According to Haaretz, "Labor Party
officialsaccused Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Defense Minister Shaul
Mofaz and other defense officials of using the Iran issue in their
election campaigns in an effort to divert public debate from social
issues".

In a message directed at the Israeli Right but equally applicable to
AIPAC and the Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations in the US,
Labor member of the Knesset, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer rejected electoral
warmongering: "I hope the upcoming elections won't motivate the prime
minister and defense minister to stray from government policy and place
Israel on the frontlines of confrontation with Iran. The nuclear issue
is an international issue and there is no reason for Israel to play a
major role in it" (Haaretz, December 14, 2005).

Israeli intelligence has determined that Iran has neither the enriched
uranium nor the capability to produce an atomic weapon now or in the
immediate future, in contrast to the hysterical claims publicized by the
US pro-Israel lobbies. Mohammed El Baradei, head of the United Nations
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has inspected Iran for
several years, has pointed out that the IAEA has found no proof that
Iran is trying to construct nuclear weapons. He criticized Israeli and
US war plans indirectly by warning that a "military solution would be
completely un-productive".

More recently, Iran, in a clear move to clarify the issue of the future
use of enriched uranium, "opened the door for US help in building a
nuclear power plant". Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza
Asefi, stated "America can take part in the international bidding for
the construction of Iran's nuclear power plant if they observe the basic
standards and quality" (USA Today, Dec. 11, 2005).

Iran also plans to build several other nuclear power plants with foreign
help. This Iranian call for foreign assistance is hardly the strategy of
a country trying to conduct a covert atomic bomb program, especially one
directed at involving one of its principal accusers.

The Iranians are at an elementary stage in the processing of uranium,
not even reaching the point of uranium enrichment, which in turn will
take still a number of years, and overcoming many complex technical
problems before it can build a bomb. There is no factual basis for
arguing that Iran represents a nuclear threat to Israel or to the US
forces in the Middle East.

Scores of countries with nuclear reactors by necessity use enriched
uranium. The Iranian decision to advance to processing enriched uranium
is its sovereign right as it is for all countries, which possess nuclear
reactors in Europe, Asia and North America. Israel and AIPAC's resort to
the vague formulation of Iran's potential nuclear capacity is so
open-ended that it could apply to scores of countries with a minimum
scientific infrastructure.

The European Quartet has raised a bogus issue by evading the issue of
whether or not Iran has atomic weapons or is manufacturing them and
focused on attacking Iran's capacity to produce nuclear energy ï¿½ namely
the production of enriched uranium. The Quartet has conflated enriched
uranium with a nuclear threat and nuclear potential with the danger of
an imminent nuclear attack on Western countries, troops and Israel. The
Europeans, especially Great Britain, have two options in mind: To impose
an Iranian acceptance of limits on its sovereignty, more specifically on
its energy policy; or to force Iran to reject the arbitrary addendum to
the Non-Proliferation Agreement and then to propagandize the rejection
as an indication of Iran's evil intention to create atomic bombs and
target pro-Western countries.

The Western media would echo the US and European governments position
that Iran was responsible for the breakdown of negotiations. The
Europeans would then convince their public that since "reason" failed,
the only recourse it to follow the US to take the issue to the Security
Council and approve international sanctions against Iran.

The US then would attempt to pressure Russia and China to vote in favor
of sanctions or to abstain. There is reason to doubt that either or both
countries would agree, given the importance of the multi-billion dollar
oil, arms, nuclear and trade deals between Iran and these two countries.
Having tried and failed in the Security Council, the US and Israel
would, on the scenario of the War Party, move toward a military attack.
An air attack on suspected Iranian nuclear facilities would entail the
bombing of heavily populated as well as remote regions leading to
large-scale loss of life.

The principal result will be a huge escalation of war throughout the
Middle East. Iran, a country of 70 million, with several times the
military forces that Iraq possessed and with highly motivated and
committed military and paramilitary forces could be expected to cross
into Iraq. Iraqi Shiites sympathetic to or allied with Iran would most
likely break their ties with Washington and go into combat. US military
bases, troops and clients would be under fierce attack. US military
casualties would multiply. All troop withdrawal plans would be
disrupted. The 'Iraqization' strategy would disintegrate.

Most likely new terrorist incidents would occur in Western Europe, North
America, and Australia and against US multinationals

Sanctions on Iran would not work, because oil is a scarce and essential
commodity. China, India and other fast-growing Asian countries would
balk at a boycott. Turkey and other Muslim countries would not
cooperate. The sanction policy would be destined to failure; its only
result to raise the price of oil even higher.

Here in the United States there are few if any influential organized
lobbies challenging the pro-war Israel lobby either from the perspective
of working for coexistence in the Middle East or even in defending US
national interests when they diverge from Israel. Although numerous
former diplomats, generals, intelligence officials, Reformed Jews,
retired National Security advisers and State Department professionals
have publicly denounced the Iran war agenda and even criticized the
Israel First lobbies, their newspaper ads and media interviews have not
been backed by any national political organization that can compete for
influence in the White House and Congress.

As we draw closer to a major confrontation with Iran and Israeli
officials set short-term deadlines for igniting a Middle East
conflagration, it seems that we are doomed to learn from future
catastrophic losses that Americans must organize to defeat political
lobbies based on overseas allegiances.

James Petras, a former Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University,
New York, owns a 50 year membership in the class struggle, is an adviser
to the landless and jobless in brazil and Argentina and is co-author of
Globalization Unmasked
(Zed).
His new book with Henry Veltmeyer, Social Movements and the State:
Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Argentina
,
will be published in October 2005. He can be reached at:
jpetras@binghamton.edu

NYT: Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove

2005-12-24T10:45:00.000-08:00

Doesn't the NYT story pretty much vindicate what Xymphora has been reporting about the US engaging in Echelon datamining of its citizens and residents? ( http://xymphora.blogspot.com (12.21.05 and 12.20.05) and for my copy with my comments http://dysbustopia.blogspot.com)

For you techies out there: is there a difference between the switches that the Times is referring to in the article below and Xymphora's reporting about Echelon datamining.

For once I can't complain about weeks and months -- and years-- delay in the Times reporting. Or can I? Are they still hiding something and trying for a limited hangout (where part of the crime is exposed to hide the larger one)?

For once the Times doesn't end their report with a palliative meant to console liberals. In their last paragraph they quote a technology expert instead of an administration hack.

Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be significant. "If the government is gaining access to the switches like this, what you're really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data," he said.

In connection with the Times and palliatives, see their otherwise good editorial on "Alito's Zeal for Presidential Power,"(12.24. 05)where they allow that Congress "will no doubt have to correct the Bush Administration's latest assertions of power to spy domestically." Compare for example with Ralph Nader's call for impeachment in "High Crimes and Misdemeanors Talkin' About the "I" Word," -in www.counterpunch.org for 12.24.05
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New York Times
Front Page

December 24, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/politics/24spy.html?pagewanted=print
Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," according to officials familiar with the matter.

"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

The current and former government officials who discussed the program were granted anonymity because it remains classified.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the technical aspects of the operation and the N.S.A.'s use of broad searches to look for clues on terrorists. Because the program is highly classified, many details of how the N.S.A. is conducting it remain unknown, and members of Congress who have pressed for a full Congressional inquiry say they are eager to learn more about the program's operational details, as well as its legality.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security's Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.

But the Bush administration regards the N.S.A.'s ability to trace and analyze large volumes of data as critical to its expanded mission to detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out, officials familiar with the program say. Administration officials maintain that the system set up by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not give them the speed and flexibility to respond fully to terrorist threats at home.

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

"All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in that area," said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

Such information often proves just as valuable to the government as eavesdropping on the calls themselves, the former manager said.

"If they get content, that's useful to them too, but the real plum is going to be the transaction data and the traffic analysis," he said. "Massive amounts of traffic analysis information - who is calling whom, who is in Osama Bin Laden's circle of family and friends - is used to identify lines of communication that are then given closer scrutiny."

Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches.

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance.

Historically, the American intelligence community has had close relationships with many communications and computer firms and related technical industries. But the N.S.A.'s backdoor access to major telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency's operational capability, according to current and former government officials.

Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be significant. "If the government is gaining access to the switches like this, what you're really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data," he said.

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

Xymphora: Echelon search capabilities

2005-12-23T12:05:00.000-08:00

Here is Xymphora's follow up to his lonely analysis of the motive driving Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance.Since Bush has ordered the monitoring of all domestic calls, no FISA warrants would ever be possible. --RB

Blogger Xymphora writes:

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

The snooping search engine
Search engine technology is what has happened to snooping. Echelon was just a giant tape recorder with the ability to identify certain key words. When a key word was detected, the system got a 'hit', with some kind of follow-up action indicated. The problem was too much information causing too many hits, making any useful sorting of false positives practically impossible. Algorithms from a company like Google (maybe exactly like Google, which may explain its success) could be used to make the process workable, with electronic snooping becoming like a search engine. Google tests relevance of search results with respect to a specific site by checking the relevance of links to that site, and checks the relevance of each such link by checking its links, and so on. If higher-rated sites link to you, then you move up in the search results.

If I say the words 'bomb' and 'movie theater', I'm probably talking about 'King Kong'. These words would make me a link, and the person I was communicating with would also become a link. The relevance of my words, and my ranking in the Echelon search engine, will depend on what my link is up to. If he is in a group which also uses the words 'bomb' and 'movie theater', I suddenly become more interesting. If some of the guys in the group are living in Pakistan and also talking about high explosives, I become real interesting. The search could be refined by then doing the advanced search of 'bomb' AND 'movie theater' BUT NOT 'King Kong'. Echelon goes from being a dumb tape recorder to becoming an active search engine for terrorism.

This system will obviously still not work, as the real terrorists don't use insecure communication lines to discuss their plans so obviously, but it is fun to snoop and is making someone a shitload of money, so it continues. The problem with the search engine model from a civil liberties point of view is that it requires the constant spidering that we see on the internet. Once I say the key words, the person I'm talking to has to be the subject of a full search, along with all the people he is talking to, and so on. This has to be done instantaneously and automatically in order to create the nexus out of which interesting data might be mined. Obviously, it is impossible to obtain FISA warrants for all these searches, so the process is intrinsically incompatible with any form of privacy rights.

The NYT framing of the matter as a wiretapping problem seems to be an attempt to allow the Bush Administration to depict it as merely the taping of conversations between foreign terrorists and their operatives in the United States. Who could object to that? After all the other crap justified on the basis of the 'war on terror' and swallowed whole by Americans - Guantanamo Bay, enemy combatants, torture, rounding up of innocent Arabs, the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, the Patriot Act - the Bush Administration seems blindsided by the negative reaction to this latest outrage. Why the difference? The average American, not in a gang and not consorting with shady types, doesn't identify with the Jose Padillas of the world. He can't conceive how Padilla's problems could impinge on his life. Snooping is entirely different. Any communication is now subject to being monitored by some NSA dweeb with a giant set of headphones, and this is a direct affront to the privacy of every American. To make it worse, there is no way you will ever know whether you are being listened to, and no change in behavior that would make you immune from surveillance. The phony 'war on terror' has finally hit home.

***

Xymphora: Why No Warrants: Theory: Bush is monitoring ALL calls

2005-12-20T12:16:00.000-08:00

12.20.05

Thanks to blogger Xymphora for seeking out a plausible rationale to answer the key question of why the Bush radicals went to such lengths to break the law when wiretaps -- on legitimate targets -- were so easy to obtain. If the anonymous informant, patcox2, on Democraticunderground.com is correct (see below), then Bush has authorized the blanket monitoring of all phone calls. (It’s hard to know exactly what this means and if such a thing can be true.I guess we're going to have to learn a lot more about Echelon.)

One question is: what does the NYT (and perhaps other media) know about the theory that the NSA is monitoring all phone calls? How surprised would we be to find that NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller are participating in a limited hangout, where part of the crime is admitted in order hide the greater sin.

**

What do people make of Xymphora's contention below that if Rove disapproves, the Times doesn't print?

If he’s right, then how much freedom would Suzlberger/Keller have to assign reporters to investigate an Echelon program in the US?

**

See Xymphora’s final link to get some mention in a Newsweek story of Bush summoning Sulzberger and Keller to the White House to press them not to publish their 12/16 domestic spying story.

**

Note also the tremendous effort the WH and their supporters are in the midst of conducting to pressure Arlen Spector not to hold hearings on the subject. How effective will Cheney be on this one?

**

Where's Hillary? Her silence, for a change, is deafening.

**

See below for the very good NYT editorial today on the part of the story that is now public information.

**

Blogger Xymphora wrote:
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Big Brother Bush
The answer to the mystery of the NSA snooping scandal - why did they break the law when it was so ludicrously easy to get FISA warrants? - appears to be developing: they weren't just wiretapping, they were data mining. They were using Echelon to 'Able Danger' the whole country (this is Poindexter's Total Information Awareness, which is supposedly dead, in action). The problem is that FISA was enacted prior to the current capability for data mining, and didn't anticipate how ubiquitous it could be. The reason they couldn't use FISA is that they would have had to obtain a FISA warrant for every person in the country. Data mining requires that you follow each link discovered by your snooping, and wouldn't work if it had to be subjected to FISA or the Constitution. The NYT article, now being spun as resisted by the Bush Administration (as if the NYT would publish anything without Rove's say-so), appears to itself be part of the spinning, a limited hang-out to cover up the bigger scandal.

Here's the first link in Xymphora's blog above. It's an anonymous note by patcox2 from DemocraticUnderground.com

The media must learn the difference between a wiretap and "Echelon."

URLhttp://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5639121#5639121 5639121,

Posted by patcox2 on Mon Dec-19-05 04:51 PM

No one is getting it. Liberals are talking in terms of "why couldn't he just go through FISA." Liberals are wasting their time arguing that Bush could easily have obtained FISA approval for what he was doing. Bush and his administration are purposely muddying the water by saying things like "we only listened to people who were talking to people with known al queda links."

In short, everyone is talking as if what the NSA does is just your typical, run of the mill law enforcement wiretap.

A typical law enforcement wiretap, the kind you can get a warrant for under FISA, allows the government to tap a person's phone, or even any phone that an identified subject might use, and listen to that person's conversations. That's what FISA authorizes, targeted wiretaps, constitutional wiretaps authorized by a constitutional warrant that identifies the specific target of the tap.

That's not what the NSA does. That's not what Bush was doing. FISA does not and cannot authorize what Bush was doing, because its unconstitutional from the get go.

FISA cannot authorize the blanket monitoring of all telephone calls, a'la Echelon.

That is what Bush was doing.

The media must learn the difference, because arguing about whether the "wiretaps" would have been authorized under FISA is missing the point, its not a wiretap program. Its the wholesale interception of all telephone communications.

Its indefensible. By muddying the water and engaging in complicated legal arguments, the media makes it look as if it is defensible, and supports the right wing meme of "the only people who care about this issue are law professors and scholars, not real Americans trying to protect against terrorist attacks" as Katie Couric put it.
***

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December 20, 2005
Editorial
The Fog of False Choices
After five years, we're used to President Bush throwing up false choices to defend his policies. Americans were told, after all, that there was a choice between invading Iraq and risking a terrorist nuclear attack. So it was not a surprise that Mr. Bush's Oval Office speech Sunday night and his news conference yesterday were thick with Orwellian constructions: the policy debate on Iraq is between those who support Mr. Bush and those who want to pull out right now, today; fighting terrorists in Iraq means we're not fighting them here.

But none of these phony choices were as absurd as the one Mr. Bush posed to justify his secret program of spying on Americans: save lives or follow the law.

Mr. Bush said he thwarted terrorist plots by allowing the National Security Agency to monitor Americans' international communications without a warrant. We don't know if that is true because the administration reverts to top-secret mode when pressed for details. But we can reach a conclusion about Mr. Bush's assertion that obeying a 27-year-old law prevents swift and decisive action in a high-tech era. It's a myth.

The 1978 law that regulates spying on Americans (remember Richard Nixon's enemies lists?) does require a warrant to conduct that sort of surveillance. It also created a special court that is capable of responding within hours to warrant requests. If that is not fast enough, the attorney general may authorize wiretaps and then seek a warrant within 72 hours.

Mr. Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales offered a whole bag of logical pretzels yesterday to justify flouting this law. Most bizarre was the assertion that Congress authorized the surveillance of American citizens when it approved the use of "all necessary and appropriate force" by the United States military to punish those responsible for the 9/11 attacks or who aided or harbored the terrorists. This came as a surprise to lawmakers, who thought they were voting for the invasion of Afghanistan and the capture of Osama bin Laden.

This administration has a long record of expanding presidential powers in dangerous ways; the indefinite detention of "unlawful enemy combatants" comes to mind. So assurances that surveillance targets are carefully selected with reasonable cause don't comfort. In a democracy ruled by laws, investigators identify suspects and prosecutors obtain warrants for searches by showing reasonable cause to a judge, who decides if legal tests were met.

Chillingly, this is not the only time we've heard of this administration using terrorism as an excuse to spy on Americans. NBC News recently discovered a Pentagon database of 1,500 "suspicious incidents" that included a Quaker meeting to plan an antiwar rally. And Eric Lichtblau and James Risen write in today's Times that F.B.I. counterterrorism squads have conducted numerous surveillance operations since Sept. 11, 2001, on groups like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Greenpeace and the Catholic Workers group.

Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the power to spy on Americans. Fine, then Congress can just take it back.

Copyright 2005The New York Times Company

K.Nimmo (8/05):M.Chossudovsky and the dogs of Reprisal

2005-12-12T16:12:00.000-08:00

Nimmo has his finger on the gatekeepers, Right and Left. Here he details, among other things, why you won't see his byline on Counterpunch any longer: he dared suggest, in one of his CP offerings, that the official story regarding 911 wasn't accurate. --Ronald

http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/index.php?cat=1

Michel Chossudovsky and the Dogs of Reprisal
Monday August 22nd 2005, 8:46 pm
Filed under: Politics
As I walked through the living room, on my way outside to play with the incoming coax cables (on occasion I have to do this to get my broadband working), I passed my wife camped out before the television, watching a “debate” between FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley and a loud, obnoxious, an interruptive Mark Williams who claimed, as I drifted past, that Saddam Hussein had “chemical weapons” (even Williams should know this was an obvious lie) and Rowley is a “traitor” because she opposes the “war” that is in fact not a war. I paused for a few seconds as the powder-puffed and air headed anchor asked Rowley why “Democrats” like Cindy Sheehan and her are against the “war” that is not a war but rather a prolonged session of organized (more or less) mass murder. Williams and this teleprompter-reading bimbo ganged up on Rowley, who is in fact one of the last remaining decent people in the country and a patriot that makes Williams look like what he is—an ill-informed yahoo who happens to have a radio program somewhere.

I felt my blood pressure on the rise, so I went outside and fiddled with the cables.

As I stood in the intense late afternoon New Mexico sun twisting on and off coax cables, I admonished myself, if only a little: don’t let them get to you. Cindy Sheehan is a thorn in the side of right-wingers, thankfully. It really irks them she is receiving the media coverage she is, albeit that coverage is biased in favor of Bush and the wingers—thus once again demonstrating there is of course no “liberal bias” in the corporate media. Cindy drives them bonkers and there is a modicum of pleasure therein. At the same time there is danger in false patriots hiding behind flags made in China demanding “traitors” such as Sheehan and Rowley be dealt with. It is a truly and sincerely scary prospect. It is also mind-boggling to consider there are such intolerant neanderthals on the loose, demanding retribution—public scorn, lost jobs, prosecution for treason, maybe even prison terms and violence—against those who believe this “war” is illegal and immoral. Because there seems to be a dozen or more Mark Williamss for every Cindy Sheehan. Indeed, much of the country has gone insane with blood-lust and warmongering dementia.

Finished with the coaxial cables, I went back inside the house. I had broadband finally. So I fired up the browser and began to read the news.

In Canada, the B’nai Brith is hounding Michel Chossudovsky for the content posted on his Global Research web site. “Michel Chossudovsky’s website may contain anti-Semitic material, but it’s not the University of Ottawa’s job to figure out if it does, according to the Canadian Association of University Teachers,” an article posted on the Ottawa Citizen site begins. “Part of the complaint was based on Mr. Chossudovsky’s status as a professor at a major university. This not only lends credibility to his views, but also puts him in a position to influence his students, according to B’nai Brith legal counsel Anita Bromberg.” And what precisely is the complaint? “Articles and postings by other writers on the website describe conspiracy theories that ‘echo the age-old anti-Semitic expressions,’ said Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B’nai Brith.”

Funny, I have read Chossudovsky’s site for years now and have never encountered anti-Semitic material—that is unless you consider the possibility Israel may have had something to do with nine eleven anti-Semitic “hate speech” or the documented fact Israel had spies in the United States (and the documented fact Israel spies followed around Mohammed Atta and the so-called nine eleven conspirators). If we are to consider such theories anti-Semitic (theories about the Israeli government, not Jews in particular) then Bush and Congress and millions of Americans are anti-Semitic for accusing Arabs (who are Semitic, whereas many Israelis are of European stock) of killing 3,000 people on nine eleven, a crime with almost no evidence and certainly no physical evidence. But of course the B’nai Brith is not concerned with that sort of anti-Semitism because a small number of people who happen to be Jews with an axe to grind (and a profitable Holocaust dog and pony show to run) have cornered the market on what is or is not Semitism.

Last time I communicated with Alex Cockburn, he took me to task for mentioning the Odigo fiasco in an anthology published by Counterpunch. Odigo is an Israeli instant message company that allegedly (according to its employees) received advanced warning of the attacks on nine eleven. I made mention of this in an article detailing the travails of one Amiri Baraka, a Beat poet who mentioned this down-the-memory-hole fact in a poem written soon after nine eleven. Apparently, Cockburn had taken heat for my in-passing mention of this allegation—reported in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz—and he didn’t appreciate it, especially after I bugged him about his willy-nilly defense against right-wingers slandering him in the media (for losing a job at the Village Voice many years ago). Needless to say, I have not bothered to send an article to Counterpunch since, not that they had posted an article I sent to them a week or so before (in standard fashion, they simply ignore articles they do not want to post on their web site, a sort of e-rejection slip—but then of course I am a “conspiracy nut” and Counterpunch, as most of the left, does not put credence in nine eleven conspiracy theories, basically swallowing the Bush version of events hook, line, and sinker; i.e., malicious and murderous Arabs are responsible for what happened on that day, even though, as I say over and over like a broken record, there is no evidence of this, that is unless you consider the word of a pathological and repeat offender liar evidence).

Problem is, I am not “progressive” or “left” enough to be published by the likes of Counterpunch and of course it does not help I pissed off Cockburn. I consider the avoidance or disbelief on the part of lefties of the very real prospect the United States government (and the British and, yes, as anti-Semitic as it will be considered, Israeli government) complicit in the crime against humanity that is nine eleven. Meanwhile, hateful cheerleaders such as Mark Williams, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Michael “Savage” Weiner, et al, ad nauseam, who are nothing less than apologists for mass murder in Iraq (based on lies) and who shamelessly exploit the dead of nine eleven to make excuses for killing even more people (more than a 100,000 so far in Iraq), are allowed wide berth in the corporate media. It is now fashionable (employing intellectual laziness and large doses of omission) to declare “we” are in Iraq because that’s where the locus of terrorism exists in the wake of nine eleven, a nothing short of preposterous argument (as if there were “terrorists,” even made-in-America terrorists, as was Osama, before he croaked, in Iraq before nine eleven, remarkably an assertion still made by right-wingers, even with scads of evidence to the contrary, but then, as we know, Bush and crew don’t do reality and the upside-down theories of Bushzarro world rule).

So I have chalked off Counterpunch and a few other lefty web sites and magazines (even as I continue provide links to them on my blogroll)—which of course makes me a right-wing nut since there are only two hues to the political spectrum in this country. In America, you can be yanked from one side of the political carnival to the other with little more than a paragraph or so posted on some obscure web site. It is testament to our bizarrely unique and truly insane political landscape—a sort of badlands where “progressive Democrats” can find the space to “support” the “war” against the utterly defenseless Iraqi people and also believe the scary campfire story about evil-doer Muslims who want to kill our children (al-Zarqawi is a sort of twisted cross between John Wayne Gacy and the Hollywood stereotypical Arab, a dark-skinned psychopath, ready to slip a knife in when you’re not looking).

Anyway, the B’nai Brith is after Chossudovsky, who I admire for his tireless dedication to the nearly thankless quest to reveal facts so few others will touch with a ten-foot pole, and they want to pull a Ward Churchill on him—get him fired, wreck his career and life, and gloat as right-wingers are wont to do. So B’nai Brith wants to paint Chossudovsky as a scurrilous anti-Semite (or a self-hating Jew) because deviating from the official version (or fairy tale) about nine eleven is defamation and beyond the pale, that is to say it deviates from the commonly held assertion only Muslims are capable of wholesale butchery and treachery, even though more than few experts familiar with the inner workings of intelligence agencies (including Mossad, the CIA, MI6, and others) relate the indisputable fact that an operation such of nine eleven could only be accomplished by state players and not a gaggle of medieval Muslims hiding out in caves in one of the most backward countries on the face of the earth (armed with little more than satellite phones, laptops, Kalashnikovs, and mules). From now on, Chossudovsky will be forced to wear the anti-Semite and Holocaust revisionist albatross about his neck. Chossudovsky will be considered a “neonazi” from here out thanks to intolerant fanatics who cannot stand for anybody, including Jews, to buck their carefully constructed (and highly profitable) orthodoxy.

I was not surprised when the Zionist amen corner chimed in—for instance the Scaife-funded wingers over at David Horowitz’s slander portal. “Canada has a growing number of jihadniks, neonazis, and leftist anti-Semites infesting its universities.” declares the Israeli settler and former American Steven Plaut on Horowitz’s Moonbat blog. Chossudovsky, according to the libel-mongering Plaut, “is an active member of the anti-war movement in Canada, and has been involved in the propagation of preposterous conspiracy ‘theories’ regarding the September 11 terrorist attacks. We could not find a single article by him in any refereed journal of economics.” For Plaut, a teacher of Israeli-centric economics in the land God promised Plaut and his fellow Arab haters and various Likudniks and off-the-wall worshippers of Jabotinsky, one is not entitled to an opinion unless he or she is “refereed” in one of a few hundred or so incestuous academic journals. “Chossudovsky’s website, www.globalresearch.ca, also reprints articles from other writers that accuse Jews of controlling the U.S. media and masterminding the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Other postings suggest Israel, the U.S. and Britain are the real perpetrators of the recent attacks on London.” Of course, as an Arab hater and would-be destroyer of Islam and all things Muslim, Plaut believes Muslims are responsible for the London bombings, sans any credible evidence. “Naturally the good professor has been endorsed by several of the neonazis who write for Counterpunch, including Donna J. Volatile, Scott Laughrey and the chronically unemployed Uruknet spokesman Kurt Nimmo.”

As previously stated, I am not a “spokesman” for anybody or any particular group—and my blog posts are re-posted on Uruknet at the discretion of that site’s owners—but all of this is lost on Plaut due to the fact he is a traducing and mean-spirited Zionist who thinks Ariel Sharon is a softie when it comes to killing Palestinians and also hates the idea people who disagree with him are allowed to exist minus never-ending punishment and retaliation. As for jobs, Plaut and the Moonbatites (including the “degreed” ones) desire for all who would dare disagree with their authoritarian and racist views to be reduced to jobless poverty and this is in fact what they are attempting to do in the case of Chossudovsky and other academics such as Ward Churchill—get them fired and pitched into lives of misery and poverty. It says a whole lot about their character—sadism and vindictiveness rule, thus making them perfect examples of the typical inhabitant of Bushzarro (and Likudite) world.

I expect another malware attack on my web site soon—and launched perniciously against others as well. For the haters and fake patriots and Arab-bashers and Bush worshippers cannot stand for the opposition to be allowed space in the commons to air their views (and one arrives at the conclusion as well these sadists resent sharing air with those they hate and wish to destroy—that is to say they have the capacity for murder, or at least a voyeuristic form of murder—thus no sense of outrage or horror at the prospect of Iraqi children cluster-bombed to death in great numbers because the Plauts of the world are essentially sociopaths).

But enough of this. I have spent a large part of the evening writing this. Outside the sun is going down and when that happens in New Mexico the sky alights with color and is a wonder to behold. I simply hope I am allowed to witness the miracle of the planet for the rest of my days. But I fear this will soon come to an end because the sociopaths and sadistic destroyers of life are in control and have unleashed the dogs of avengement and they seem to be staffing the depths of the Bush administration and B’nai Brith and classrooms in Israel where lessons in economics are allegedly taught.

16 Comments

Opus Dei Columnist Novak Slams Sheehan
Monday August 22nd 2005, 11:29 am
Filed under: Politics
It was mildly amusing when right-wing columnist Robert Novak childishly stormed off the CNN set after an encounter with pit bull James Carville. It is not amusing, however, to read Novak’s August 20 Creators Syndicate, Inc. column slamming Citizen Sheehan for her protest against the Bushites for their illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq. Blowhard Novak takes Cindy Sheehan to task for working with Code Pink-Women For Peace, United for Peace & Justice, and Veterans For Peace, complaining that these organizations “openly support the Iraqi insurgency against U.S. troops,” in other words they oppose the occupation and continuing mass murder of the Iraqi people.

It irks Novak that these “organizations were represented at a mock ‘war crimes’ trial in Istanbul that on June 27 produced a joint declaration backing the insurgency. Based on the United Nations Charter, it said ‘the popular national resistance to the occupation is legitimate and justified. It deserves the support of people everywhere who care for justice and freedom,’” but then right-wing elitists such as Novak hate the United Nations, or at least its charter, even though the globalist organization engages faithfully in the handiwork of the neoliberals who are working feverishly to reduce the world to a sweatshop where “national resistance” to occupation and unbridled thievery of natural and human resources is eradicated with a bevy of new weapons and nightmarish covert operations.

As Andrew Sullivan and others note, Novak “is a convert not just to Catholicism but to its most hardline sect, Opus Dei,” which may partially explain Novak’s right-wing mindset. Opus Dei is an elitist secret society and was at home in the Generalissimo Francisco Franco “Falangist” (in other words, fascist) regime in Spain and in Chile under General Augusto Pinochet (other converts include Watergate criminal Charles Colson, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, and the former Somalian dictator Mohammed Siad Barre). “Ascetism, anticommunism, a rigid hierarchicalism, religious militancy and secrecy have become the distinguishing marks of the organization,” explains Right Web. “In an interview for the Catholic diosesan newspaper, the Brooklyn Tablet, Fr. Angel de la Parte Paris observed that Opus Dei professes a fundamentalist theology, condemns Liberation Theology, has no concern for social problems, leaves little freedom to an individual’s conscience, and is associated with secular power structures.” In short, it is a perfect fit for the religiously inclined among the neolib elite, especially those attracted to fascism or authoritarianism. Fascists have no problem dehumanizing those who disagree with them, and either do adherents to Opus Dei. “Escrivá teaches to take away oneself’s heart, senses and emotions (maxims 166, 181, 188); this proves that [José María Escrivá de Balaguer, the founder of Opus Dei] was a psychopath, because psychopaths despise all feelings in order to satisfy their desires. These teachings can produce people so cruel as nazis,” notes the Maria Auxiliadora Prayer Group.

“Though Novak’s adherence to Opus Dei has never been confirmed—as a policy, the organization doesn’t reveal its rolls—D.C. insiders have for years noted the pundit’s close relationship with Father C. John McCloskey III, an eminent member of the group who helped baptize the Jewish-born Novak into Catholicism in 1998,” writes Radar Online. “McCloskey is also believed to have brought other high-profile Washington conservatives into the group, including book publisher Alfred Regnery, Republican Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, and Novak’s former CNN colleague, Larry Kudlow.” Brownback, yet another Republican presidential wanna-be, considers himself part of “the righteous remnant,” that is to say rich people with evangelical religious views. Brownback is also known as “the new internationalist,” i.e., a radical and fascist Catholic globalist.

Considering the above, Novak’s distaste for Sheehan and the anti-war movement is perfectly natural, although—as the corporate media has demonstrated over the last couple weeks—one need not be an Opus Dei crackpot in order to hate Sheehan: a garden variety right-winger and mindless Bush supporter, fully vested in the upside-down tenants of Bushzarro world, will suffice. However, it is demonstrative that a guy like Novak—an icon of the corporate media—would be involved with the legacy of Franco, Pinochet, and the self-flagellating misogynist and mental case José María Escrivá de Balaguer.

13 Comments

Iraq: Chuck Hagel Doesn’t Get It—and then He Does
Monday August 22nd 2005, 8:46 am
Filed under: Politics
Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, who got himself shot up in Vietnam (or “earned” two Purple Hearts, anyway), doesn’t get it. He says the “war” in Iraq “has destabilized the Middle East,” according to the Guardian, and believes there needs to be an exit strategy. “I think our involvement there has destabilized the Middle East. And the longer we stay there, I think the further destabilization will occur.” Well, Chuck may not realize it, but that is precisely the game plan—the neocons want to destabilize the Middle East, decimate Islamic societies and culture, and instigate a revamped Sykes-Picot Agreement of sorts, that is to say carve up the Middle East like the Brits and French did in 1916.

Of course, it is not 1916, the Middle East is not emerging from under six hundred years under Ottoman rule, modern Arab nationalism has existed for nearly a century, and Arabs and Muslims are all too willing to resist invasion and occupation, taking as their example the enduring struggle for self-determination of the Palestinians. Hagel, the man who would be president, also said Iraq is beginning to look more and more like Vietnam. Hagel said the United States is “locked into a bogged-down problem not unsimilar, dissimilar to where we were in Vietnam.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this one out: people will resist occupation by all means available, even if it takes “terrorism,” that is to say blowing stuff up and killing people. It would seem Congress is rife with people who are unable to understand the most rudimentary concepts of human nature.

Meanwhile, Sen. George Allen, yet another presidential wanna-be, disagreed. “I think this is a very crucial time for the future of Iraq,'’ said Allen, appearing on ABC. “The terrorists don’t have anything to win the hearts and minds of the people of Iraq. All they care to do is disrupt.” Indeed, they are disrupting the neocon plan to turn Iraq (and the rest of the Middle East) into a neolib vassal state run by a few hand-picked autocrats with a brutal military and state police at their disposal to deal with troublemakers, that is to say people who don’t cotton to making a thirty cents an hour in a Nike sweatshop. Once again, the real disrupting force in Iraq is the presence of the United States military and their winnowed would-be kings, tribal dons, and warlords.

It was Sunday and the Congress critters were out in number, taking the powder puff on the corporate media news programs. “The worst-case scenario is not staying four years. The worst-case scenario is leaving a dysfunctional, repressive government behind that becomes part of the problem in the war on terror and not the solution,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, on Fox. Of course, in the beginning, as Bush fished for an excuse to invade, we were told Iraq had scads of weapons of mass destruction, and then when that turned out to be a lie (as more than a few of us said it would), the excuse turned into the sickeningly disingenuous claim that Bush and crew were delivering democracy to benighted Arabs (not that the Straussian-Machiavellians surrounding Bush would know real democracy, even if it came up and bit them on the derriere), but that was of course not a good enough reason to get a couple GIs a day killed, so now Bush and the would-be presidential Congress critters tells us the United States is occupying Iraq in order to fight the interminable war on terrorism.

Finally, the good ol’ boy Sen. Trent Lott threw in his two cents. Much like a blind man caressing an elephant ear, Lott said the U.S. is winning in Iraq but has “a way to go'’ before it “meets its goals” there. Meanwhile, more needs to be done to lay out the strategy, Lott said on NBC. Of course, this is now a standard mantra, a Bushzarro maxim—the United States is “winning,” when in fact it is losing because the Iraqi people (who see themselves as Palestinians and the Americans as Zionists) are determined to keep blowing up Humvees, piling up the dead and wounded, until the United States leaves, as it did in Vietnam.

In the meantime, there is a “way to go” before this reality—minus extreme brutality, the United States will never be able to seriously occupy Iraq, as the French were unable to occupy Algeria (where some serious brutality was in fact levied, all for naught)—sinks in. Cindy Sheehan is but one grieving mother of a son meat grinded by the neocon death machine. More Cindy Sheehans will emerge as the United States “meets its goals” in Iraq. Such a grassroots movement will either put an end to the Straussian-Machiavellian death machine or the state will redouble its effort, as it did in the 60s with COINTELPRO, to kill what will be anti-war democracy in action.

5 Comments

MindWar: Full Spectrum Fake Terrorism
Sunday August 21st 2005, 9:53 am
Filed under: Politics
Jeffrey Steinberg, in an article appearing in the August 26 issue of the Executive Intelligence Review, mentions Col. Paul E. Vallely, the Commander of the 7th Psychological Operations Group, United States Army Reserve, and a document he authored entitled From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory (note: link is a PDF document). “MindWar must be strategic in emphasis, with tactical applications playing a reinforcing, supplementary role,” Vallely wrote in 1980. “In its strategic context, MindWar must reach out to friends, enemies, and neutrals alike across the globe—neither through primitive ‘battlefield’ leaflets and loudspeakers of PSYOP nor through the weak, imprecise, and narrow effort of psychotronics [the relationship between matter, energy, and consciousness]—but through the media possessed by the United States which have the capabilities to reach virtually all people on the face of the Earth.” In short, the corporate media, Vallely wrote 25 years ago, is an integral and essential component and “force multiplier” of forever war waged against enemies, including the American people.

Steinberg spends a lot of time documenting the occult and paranormal activities of Pentagon researchers (and also “weapons that directly attack the targetted population’s central nervous system and brain functioning,” including “such phenomena as atmospheric electromagnetic activity, air ionization, and extremely low frequency waves), but for my dime the interesting part of Steinberg’s analysis concerns the use of fake terrorism, or “pseudo gang” terrorism and “psychological operations” of the sort used against the “targetted population” here in the United States since nine eleven and, more recently, in Britain. For instance, Steinberg references Seymour Hersh, who quoted Naval Postgraduate School defense analyst and Pentagon counterinsurgency advisor John Arquilla (see my January blog entry on Hersh and Arquilla in regard to pseudo terrorism and the kidnapping and apparent murder of Margaret Hassan). “Hersh hinted [in his New Yorker article, The Coming Wars] that U.S. Special Forces units were being unleashed to create their own terrorist ‘pseudo gangs’ to more easily infiltrate terrorist groups like al-Qaeda,” as Steinberg summarizes. “When conventional military operations and bombing failed to defeat the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya in the 1950s, the British formed teams of friendly Kikuyu tribesmen who went about pretending to be terrorists,” writes Arquilla. “These ‘pseudo gangs,’ as they were called, swiftly threw the Mau Mau on the defensive, either by befriending and then ambushing bands of fighters or by guiding bombers to the terrorists’ camps. What worked in Kenya a half-century ago has a wonderful chance of undermining trust and recruitment among today’s terror networks. Forming new pseudo gangs should not be difficult.”

It is my contention al-Qaeda (or more precisely, al-CIA-duh) is just such a “pseudo gang,” initially created in Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the Soviets but held over—as are all successful intelligence operations (and the CIA admits the creation of the Islamic Terror Network is its largest and most successful operation to date; see Chalmers Johnson). As the corporate media (as a willing participant in psychological warfare against the American people) would have it, al-CIA-duh reformulated itself without intelligence assistance after the United States abandoned Afghanistan in the wake of the Soviet defeat in that backwater and more or less strategically meaningless country (that is until a consortium of oil and natural gas corporations decided they wanted to build a pipeline there in the 1990s). There is ample evidence that al-CIA-duh remained a valued intelligence “asset” (and covert warfare workhorse) after Afghanistan, the primary example being its activities in the Balkans (see my From Afghanistan to Iraq: Transplanting CIA Engineered Terrorism) and elsewhere.

As Steinberg notes, once again referencing the detective work of Hersh, “[Evangelical Christian Lieutenant-General William “Jerry” Boykin] and his immediate boss, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, are directly in charge of the Special Operations search-and-kill squads touted by John Arquilla in his pseudo-gang promo.” Joe E. Kilgore, writing for Special Warfare in the Winter of 2002, declares that the “future holds great promise for the Center and School and for the students it trains. The commanding general of SWCS [John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School], Major General William G. Boykin, is developing the ARSOF School of the Future, an innovative concept designed to ensure that SWCS instructional facilities and techniques will meet the challenges of the 21st century. The SWCS Special Forces Evolution Steering Committee is developing a road map to facilitate the transformation of the Special Forces Branch. Improvement plans for both CA and PSYOP have been approved, and those plans are scheduled to be implemented beginning in FY 2002.” An integral component of the Pentagon’s ambitious psyop program is Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG). “P2OG would launch secret operations aimed at ’stimulating reactions’ among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction, meaning it would prod terrorist cells into action, thus exposing them to ‘quick-response’ attacks by US forces. The means by which it would do this is the far greater use of special operations forces,” David Isenberg wrote for the Asia Times in November, 2002. P2OG, however, is only the public relations face of a much larger and sinister plan that stretches back at least to 1980 and Col. Paul E. Vallely’s seminal MindWar document and the idea of psychological warfare waged against the American people.

Vallely, of course, does not mention “pseudo-gang” warfare explicitly and instead puts forward the idea of “full spectrum” warfare in all fronts, including disinformation or propaganda warfare waged against the American people. Indeed, the idea of fake or deceptive terrorism is much older and originated in its modern form and was field tested by General Frank Kitson, a British officer “who first thought up the concept that was later used in the formation of Al Qaeda. He called it the ‘pseudo gang’—a state sponsored group used to advance an agenda, while discrediting the real opposition. The strategy was used in both Kenya and Northern Ireland. In the case of Northern Ireland, most of the violence that was attributed to ‘Loyalists’ was in actuality not their handiwork, but the result of the activities of the death squads affiliated to the British secret state,” writes Ian Buckley (see my General Frank Kitson: Trail Blazing Fake Terrorism).

15 Comments

ADE Hacked
Saturday August 20th 2005, 12:27 pm
Filed under: Politics
ADE suffered a malware exploit early Thursday. I restored the site this afternoon and will be posting later in the day.

45 Comments

On Jack Blood’s Show
Wednesday August 17th 2005, 2:05 pm
Filed under: Politics
I will be a guest on Jack Blood’s radio program—1:00 to 3:00 Central Time. Check it out online via streaming audio here.

7 Comments

Danger Will Robertson! Osama in Iraq!
Wednesday August 17th 2005, 10:54 am
Filed under: Politics
Oh, brother, here we go again. “Al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, is headed for Iraq to boost his network’s standing as it embarks on an ‘offensive whose scale and importance rival September 9/11,’ a media report said,” the Hindustan Times expects us to believe (incidentally, the story originates in Jerusalem, as it states below the byline). “Coded electronic signals intercepted in recent days among Al-Qaeda’s Middle Eastern elements across secret Internet sites carry the message that the terror network’s supreme leader has come out of his hiding in Afghanistan and has set out, or is about to set out, for Iraq, Debkafile, a weekly, known for investigative journalism reported.” Debkafile is a Zionist propaganda organ and should be discounted out of hand.

“The signals cap a secret exchange of messages in recent weeks in which the organization’s Iraq commander, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, attempted to persuade Bin Laden to leave Afghanistan and take command of the Ramadan offensive in Iraq.” Not so secret if the media knows about it. But never mind.

“According to Debkafile’s exclusive [Likudite] counter-terror sources, Zarqawi is said to have argued that Bin Laden’s presence in Iraq would boost Al-Qaeda’s standing before setting on an ‘offensive whose scale and importance rival the September 2001 operation’ and goes well with his own safety.” Never mind both these guys are dead and buried, as previously documented. But even if Osama was alive, the question remains: traveling on the Q.T., how would he get his regular kidney dialysis procedure? Maybe he put one of these on the back of a mule?

“The weekly had earlier reported that Al-Qaeda has established a new marine base in the remote Gawatar Bay, a Persian Gulf inlet down the middle of which runs the Pakistani-Iranian border.” Now we’re told al-CIA-duh has a “marine base” (al-CIA-duh battleships?) and for some reason nobody has bothered to bomb this base. Note the inclusion of the word “Iran” here.

“Its operatives are said to be active on both shores, on the Pakistani side, using the Baluchi villages strung along the River Dasht which empties into the divided bay as sanctuaries. On the Iranian side, they move around the Baluchi port of Chah-Bahar (Bandar Beheshti).” It is awfully odd that MEK (the Mujahedin el Khalq) and al-CIA-duh share the same turf (or rather it is not so odd). MEK are Straussian neocon darlings (recall Richard Perle, aka the Prince of Darkness, gave a speech at a MEK fundraiser).

Obviously, this Debka-based story is rubbish. Osama and Abu are dead, al-Qaeda is a scary public relations scam (note that most al-CIA-duh detainees at Camp Gitmo and elsewhere are basically hapless dirt farmers and cab drivers), and Bush is looking for a new way to pump life back into his faltering “war” against the Iraqi people. Bush (or rather his handlers in the Pentagon) may believe the apparition of Osama in Iraq (a mercurial presence like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi) may be the ticket. However, this will do absolutely nothing to stop the Iraqi people from resisting Bush’s illegal and immoral occupation.

8 Comments

De Menezes: Another Corpse on the Road to Globalist Fascism
Wednesday August 17th 2005, 9:51 am
Filed under: Politics
The blogger Aangirfan draws a parallel between the execution of the seemingly hapless Jean Charles de Menezes on 22 July in the London subway and Operation Gladio. As Aangirfan points out, de Menezes “behaved normally” when he entered Stockwell Tube station, did not run from police (or rather a “Special Reconnaissance Regiment, modeled on an undercover unit that operated in Northern Ireland,” according to the Guardian), did not jump a tollgate and used his Oyster card (a travel smartcard), nor was he wearing bulky clothes (see this gruesome image), he was apparently unaware the SRR hit squad was tailing him, and he did not trip as he ran and was in fact shot as he sat in the subway car. (See Blunders led to police killing of an innocent man, the Scotsman.)

All of this, of course, is at variance with the original story, prompting us to wonder why Brit officials decided to completely distort the story. Is it possible they did so because the SRR executed de Menezes because he was somehow involved in the staged “suicide bombings” on July 7, possibly as a technician (de Menezes was an electrician and recall there were “electrical surges” reported prior to the bombings). For some reason, the SRR did not want de Menezes to travel on the subway and decided to snuff him, regardless of the fact there were witnesses on the carriage. Since the cover story is completely decimated—he was a terrorist, a possible suicide bomber, and attempted to flee—there are now plenty of questions about the cold-blooded murder of Charles de Menezes, questions that will probably never be resolved.

In regard to the Gladio angle, as mentioned by Aangirfan, I have problems with this. Aangirfan provides an excellent summation of Gladio and its fascist “kontrgerilla” operations. However, the blogger fails to explain why such a Gladio operation would execute de Menezes. As we know, through ample (and generally ignored) documentation, Operation Gladio was devised to blame terrorism on leftist and progressive political organizations, thus alienating them from the public. This was its overriding raison detre. Now, if de Menezes was killed in a Gladio assassination op, it would make sense for his killers to present themselves as Muslims, thus affixing blame to the target group of such an operation (and affix the impression of crazed Muslim assassins on the loose). Instead, de Menezes was killed by people identified at first as police, later as SRR goons, who made no effort to pass themselves off as Muslims. In fact, after the hit, the Brit authorities claimed the execution was part of a “shoot-to-kill” directive, an effort (based on Israeli practices) to eliminate suicide bombers before they strike. As we now know, this was pure and unadulterated nonsense. In fact, the shoot-to-kill policy was recently embraced by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and their proposed guidelines would embrace a “more aggressive posture than typical lethal-force guidelines,” according to the Age, thus promoting the globalist plan to militarize police forces around the world (or those not already militarized) and get people accustomed to death squads (and Israeli-styled “targeted assassination”) in the name of fighting (state-sponsored, false flag) terrorism.

No, I don’t believe Jean Charles de Menezes was executed in a Gladio-styled operation. However, I do believe the Brits (and their counterparts in the United States) are now entirely willing to assassinate their opponents (or perform “clean up crew” operations of lower echelon players in false flag covert ops) in public, as they did in Northern Ireland, Malaya, Kenya, and as they continue to do in Iraq (the latter can be considered a virtual testing ground for “counter-insurgency” black operations, from forming and fronting “pseudo-gang” terrorist groups and individuals—think Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the so-called al-Qaeda Organization in the Land of Two Rivers—as prescribed under the now largely forgotten P2OG, or the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group as brainstormed by Rumsfeld’s Defense Science Board in 2002). “The new apparatus for covert operations and the growing government secrecy associated with the war on terrorism reflect the way the Bush administration’s most senior officials see today’s world,” writes William M. Arkin, a military affairs analyst for the Los Angeles Times. “The [Defense Science Board] recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception.” I believe the execution of Jean Charles de Menezes was associated with such covert action and the P2OG network (for lack of a more inclusive term) is global, encompassing not only the Pentagon but the far reaches of British military intelligence. As for the Gladio connection, consider that MI6 had an affinity for fascism, as demonstrated prior to WWII by Wing Commander Frederick Winterbottom, who argued that Britain and Germany unite against the Soviet Union and communists in general.

21 Comments

Whitewash Crew Attempts to Bury Able Danger Revelations
Tuesday August 16th 2005, 12:23 pm
Filed under: Politics
It really is a no-brainer: Mohamed Atta (and his doubles) was allowed to run around the country unmolested, apparently plotting mayhem (as instructed), even though a DIA op dubbed Able Danger discovered him and attempted sound the alarm. In a lame effort to bury this damaging revelation, nine eleven whitewash commission taskmasters Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton issued a joint statement declaring “that panel staff members have found no documents or other witnesses to back up claims made by a U.S. Navy officer, who told the commission staff in July 2004 that he recalled seeing Atta’s name and photograph on a chart prepared by another officer. Panel officials also said they have found no evidence to support similar claims made to reporters by a second person, a former defense intelligence official,” reports the Washington Post. “None of the documents turned over to the commission mention Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers,” the whitewash commission statement continued. “Nor do any of the staff notes on documents reviewed in the [Defense Department] reading room indicate that Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers were mentioned in any of those documents.” I guess Kean and Hamilton never heard of a paper shredder.

“The importance of this week’s revelation that an Army intelligence unit was tracking Mohamed Atta’s movements in the U.S. during 1999 and 2000 is so mind-boggling that it seems nobody quite gets it yet,” opines Daniel Hopsicker. “Here’s the big question nobody seems to be ready to ask: Upon what basis did the 9.11 Commission conclude that the FBI’s timeline was correct and that an elite Army Intel unit was mistaken in saying they were tracking Mohamed Atta roaming freely across America during 1999 and 2000?” Another no-brainer: the FBI timeline fits the official nine eleven cover story whereas the timeline brought to light by Congress critter Curt Weldon does not. “This is much ado about nothing,” declared a senior Pentagon official, attempting to bury the damn thing. It really is an embarrassment and needs to be buried along with a dog bone and junior’s homework, preferably in the depths of Foggy Bottom where the skeletons are stacked high.

Back in 2002, it was revealed (by Oliver Schroem in the German publication Die Zeit) that the CIA knew exactly what their proxy (al-CIA-duh) was up to as they had Malaysian spooks monitoring an al-CIA-duh confab in Kuala Lumpur, where the attacks on the USS Cole and World Trade Center were planned. “The CIA was able to determine the identities of the participants, if not the entire agenda. Among those attending: …Ramzi Binalshibh, a student in Germany who then returned there and supposedly organized the Hamburg cell led by Atta; and … Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. They subsequently entered the United States and moved around the country freely for 18 months, before they allegedly helped to hijack the Pentagon plane on Sept. 11,” the New York Times reported at the time. “Although the C.I.A. identified the two men as suspected extremists, the agency did not request that they be placed on the government’s watch lists to keep them out of the United States until late August 2001. By that time, they were both already in the country. In addition, while the two men lived in San Diego, their landlord was an F.B.I. informant, but the bureau did not learn of their terrorist links from the informant.”

In other words, we are expected to believe both the CIA and the FBI are completely brain-dead and unable to process the most basic intelligence information. In fact, the CIA (with the assistance of the so-called Israeli “art student” spies and covert op facilitators) micromanaged the nine eleven plot patsies, from Hamburg to flight training and beyond. “Rather than uncover the real story of the terrorist attacks, the commission conducted a sophisticated cover-up of the real relations between US government agencies and the terrorists who killed 3,000 people,” writes Patrick Martin. “Meanwhile, [Philip] Zelikow, the chief organizer of the 9/11 panel, has been rewarded for his services to the Bush administration and to the military/intelligence apparatus with an appointment as senior counselor to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a longtime friend and associate.” In short, moles working for the real nine eleven plotters are in the process of receiving accolades for all their hard work.

Of course, the Able Danger revelations are less than worthless—and will be swept under the rug in due time—because most Americans have swallowed the official version of events hook, line, and sinker, and are not keen to discover what really happened on nine eleven, as they blissfully go about their way like herded sheep, unquestioningly taking whatever pabulum their government dishes out, and limiting their political activity and awareness to sporting yellow magnetic ribbons on their SUVs.

20 Comments

Fake Liberalism and the Threat of Cindy Sheehan
Monday August 15th 2005, 1:58 pm
Filed under: Politics
On the drive home from a doctor appointment, I did it again: switched on AM radio. As a political blogger, it should not be surprising I listen and watch political commentary on the radio and television. But here in southern New Mexico, as in most of the rest of the country, the media outlets are glutted with Republican radio and television, so my choices are limited, if not completely constricted. So I listened to Rush Limbaugh, who comes off as a flaming liberal when compared to the guy who is on in the evening—Michael Weiner, who likes to call himself Savage. Predictably, Limbaugh was talking about Cindy Sheehan, the scourge-de-jure of far right Republicans. Said Limbaugh—and I paraphrase—Sheehan is basically a sock puppet for people who hate this country. I had a chuckle over that one. I sure the heck do not hate this country—as if one can truly hate everything about the country where he was born and lived his whole life—but I sure dislike the Limbaugh Republicans and the Savage fascists who dominate the airwaves and remarkably claim there is “liberal bias” in the corporate media.

Once home, I of course flipped on the computer, checked the blog (moderated a couple dozen comments) and went about reading the news and commentary of the day. Cliff Kincaid and Roger Aronoff, on the National Ledger web site (naturally I read the far right fruitcakes as well as the “liberal” and “hate America” web sites and blogs), where banner ads featuring teenage girls in their underwear seem normal (semi-naked girls huckstering cell phones are a fad over there), are P.O.’d at the “liberal” media for paying attention to Cindy Sheehan. According to Kincaid and Aronoff, the Washington Post is an “anti-war” newspaper, a rather delusional assertion considering it was on of the last newspaper to come out against the Vietnam War. I guess Kincaid and Aronoff consider the Times “liberal” or “anti-war” because the newspaper has resisted any hostile take-over “bid” by the likes of Fox’s Rupert Murdoch. In fact, the Washington Post is “liberal” to a certain degree—that is to day neoliberal.

“With a 21st-century perspective, where internationalism has become globalization, and monopoly capitalism is so powerful it no longer needs to mask its agenda with welfare programs, we can see the Establishment’s ‘liberalism’ for the ruthless neoliberalism it has always been,” writes Michael Hasty. “Yet the more powerful and elite the ruling class, the greater its need for an effective propaganda system to maintain that power; and the Washington Post remains, as writer Doug Henwood described it in 1990, ‘the establishment’s paper.’” It should also be noted that the Washington Post has a history of serving as a propaganda organ for the likes of the CIA and military intelligence—Philip Graham, who owned the paper after the Second World War, had been in military intelligence, and “Watergate-era editor Ben Bradlee also had an intelligence background; and before he became a journalist, reporter Bob Woodward was an officer in Naval Intelligence,” writes Hasty. “In a 1977 article in Rolling Stone magazine about CIA influence in American media, Woodward’s partner, Carl Bernstein, quoted this from a CIA official: ‘It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from.’ Graham has been identified by some investigators as the main contact in Project Mockingbird, the CIA program to infiltrate domestic American media.” I guess, in Bushzarro world, the CIA is considered liberal, especially after it failed to go along with Dick Cheney and the Straussian neocons and clank out lie after outrageous lie about Saddam Hussein.

Anyway, I find it refreshing (and entertaining) that paranoid neocon nut-jobs are all atwitter over Cindy Sheehan, showing their true colors by viciously slamming her and, by way of extension, her dead son. It is ridiculous to say the “anti-war” corporate media—an oxymoron if ever there was one—is on Cindy’s side. In fact, they are on the side of making a quick buck by exploiting whatever story comes along and the Cindy Sheehan story is a big one with plenty of potential for cash revenue—that is until the next Natalee Holloway story comes along. According to Kincaid and Aronoff, Cindy is a “hostage of far-left elements,” as if there is a McCarthy-like left-wing plot afoot in America, an absurdity to anybody who looks at the political situation in this country minus the ocular exercises of Bushzarro world.

In fact, the far right views of Cliff Kincaid and Roger Aronoff are far more common than they would have us believe (rabid right-wing Republicans need to stop claiming they are underdogs, lest they become a laughingstock) and a few semi-liberal editorials on social issues in the New York Times make not a leftist conspiracy. As we know, in regard to foreign policy and Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, the corporate media is slavishly in step with the Bushcons and the radical right. Media corporations—hierarchical and basically authoritarian organisms—are incapable of sincere liberalism, even the faux liberalism preached by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean.

27 Comments

Turkish Intelligence: Al-Qaeda a U.S. Covert Operation
Monday August 15th 2005, 3:14 am
Filed under: Politics
Consider the following, published in Zaman, the fifth largest newspaper in Turkey: “Amid the smoke from the fortuitous fire [i.e., the capture of Louai Sakra, said to be the al-CIA-duh regional boss in Turkey] emerged the possibility that al-Qaeda may not be, strictly speaking, an organization but an element of an intelligence agency operation. Turkish intelligence specialists agree that there is no such organization as al-Qaeda. Rather, Al-Qaeda is the name of a secret service operation. The concept ‘fighting terror’ is the background of the ‘low-intensity-warfare’ conducted in the mono-polar world order. The subject of this strategy of tension is named as ‘al-Qaeda.’” Note the use of the phrase “strategy of tension,” an obvious reference to Gladio, the state-sponsored terrorist operation in Italy (basically a series of fascist false flag operations, or “low intensity warfare,” blamed on leftists). It is interesting that Turkish intelligence would admit that the neocon “war against terrorism” is an entirely artificial construct.

Moreover, according to Turkish intelligence, “Sakra has been sought by the secret services since 2000. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) interrogated him twice before. Following the interrogation CIA offered him employment. He also received a large sum of money by CIA. However the CIA eventually lost contact with him.” It is curious how alleged key people in the al-CIA-duh network end up working for the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

For instance, Abdurahman Khadr, who (according to ABC News Online) “lived side-by-side with Osama bin Laden,” was a “double agent, sent to spy on Al Qaeda fighters at Guantanamo Bay and in Bosnia.” Ali Mohamed, a former U.S. Army sergeant who trained Osama bin Laden’s bodyguards and helped plan the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, worked for the FBI (Mohamed, obviously with the grace of the feds, brought Ayman al-Zawahiri to San Francisco on a covert fund-raising mission), according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Hamid Reza Zakeri claimed (during the trial of Abdelghani Mzoudi, a Moroccan accused of helping the nine eleven hijackers) that “Iran’s secret service had contacts with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network ahead of the September 11 attacks,” according to Reuters. It just so happens Zakeri claims the CIA owes him $1.2 for services rendered as a double agent. Mullah Krekar, the leader of Ansar al-Islam, told al-Hayat newspaper in 2003 he had “a meeting with a CIA representative and someone from the American army in the town of Sulaymaniya (Iraqi Kurdistan) at the end of 2000. They asked us to collaborate with them,” an offer Krekar said he refused. Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, aka Abu Omar, “a dangerous terrorist who once plotted to kill the Egyptian foreign minister,” according to the Chicago Tribune, was such a valued CIA asset it was deemed necessary to kidnap him off the streets of Milan after he had second thoughts about his work. And then there was Muhammad Naeem Noor Khanm, the al-Qaeda “computer engineer” who “became part of a sting operation organized by the CIA,” according to the Washington Post.

Of course, all of this CIA funny business is coincidental. Remember, the CIA is ineffectual, even if it did create Islamic terrorism—the agency actually boasts about this, says the Afghan Mujahideen (aka “al-Qaeda”) was its most successful operation to date—and it was “intelligence failures” that caused nine eleven.

21 Comments

We Don’t Need an Abbie Hoffman
Sunday August 14th 2005, 12:37 pm
Filed under: Politics
Consider the following, buried in a San Francisco Chronicle article about Cindy Sheehan: “This generation of anti-war activists has so far produced few, if any, personalities that have connected with a majority of Americans. There are no Abbie Hoffmans or Tom Haydens, who emerged during the Vietnam War’s protest movement. No Yippies. Not even a young John Kerry, who testified against that war before Congress wearing his Army uniform. Some anonymity is intentional. In the words of Bill Dobbs, an organizer with United for Peace and Justice, anti-war leaders have been reluctant to promote a personality over their message because ‘power corrupts.’” Of course, the corporate media would love a new Abbie Hoffman or Tom Hayden, somebody they can slap on the television screen and magnify and exploit their all-too-human foibles. In fact, the strength of the decentralized anti-war (and anti-Bush) movement (even as it fails) is precisely in the fact it has no Abbie Hoffman leader type of personality.

I am old enough to remember the last anti-war movement and recall how it was destroyed precisely because it had leaders and offices with street addresses. It was called COINTELPRO, or Counter Intelligence Program. “The purpose of the program was, in FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s own words, to ‘expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize’ specific groups and individuals,” write Mike Cassidy and Will Miller. “Its targets in this period [the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s] included the American Indian Movement, the Communist Party, the Socialist Worker’s Party, Black Nationalist groups, and many members of the New Left (SDS, and a broad range of anti-war, anti-racist, feminist, lesbian and gay, environmentalist and other groups). Many other groups and individuals seeking racial, gender and class justice were targets who came under attack, including Martin Luther King, Cesar Chavez, the NAACP, the National Lawyer’s Guild, SANE-Freeze, American Friends Service Committee, and many, many others.”

I’m afraid the movement coalescing around Cindy Sheehan (especially her own organization, Gold Star Families for Peace) will fall victim to same tactics. It would be naive to think there are not FBI agents in the process of infiltrating Sheehan’s organization and others currently aligning themselves with Sheehan’s cause.

But it is exceeding difficult for the FBI (and the CIA, admittedly working out of FBI offices around the country) to effectively go after thousands of us not connected to a particular group or organization, those of us who run anti-war web sites and blogs, who spread the word through cyberspace. Granted, most of what we do is preach to the converted, but that is the case with traditional organizations as well. However, my blog received over a million and a half hits last month and between four and five thousand unique visitors come here every single day. Multiply that across the board and you have a lot of people educating themselves (and hopefully educating others). Of course, due to the fact most people get their information from the corporate media—and the corporate media consistently downplays the role of web sites and blogs (even accuses them of facilitating terrorism)—we have a whole lot of work to do. As it now stands, the only way the government can put a stop to the growing tide of people tuning out the corporate media in favor of alternative web sites and blogs would be to pull the plug on the internet (or classify sites such as this as “terrorist” and expunge our DNS entries). I’m not sure they will be able to do this in short order.

In the meantime, it is probably best to stay away from crowds, especially when such crowds are crawling with FBI agents and agents provocateurs.

43 Comments

Sheehan: It’s About PNAC and the Neocons
Sunday August 14th 2005, 11:06 am
Filed under: Politics
In response to a comment posted on this blog—claiming I am an anti-Semitic conspiracy nut who blames everything on the poor Jews—allow me to quote Cindy Sheehan: “Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel. Am I stupid? No, I know full-well that my son, my family, this nation, and this world were betrayed by George [W.] Bush who was influenced by the neo-con PNAC agenda after 9/11. We were told that we were attacked on 9/11 because the terrorists hate our freedoms and democracy…not for the real reason, because the Arab-Muslims who attacked us hate our middle-eastern foreign policy. That hasn’t changed since America invaded and occupied Iraq…in fact it has gotten worse.”

Is Cindy Sheehan a Nazi-loving anti-Semite who wants to shove Jews in crematoria ovens—or is she simply telling the truth (and a well-documented truth, albeit consistently ignored by the corporate media)? Naturally, it didn’t take long for the far right-wing apologists to scream “Sheehan’s a Jew-hating anti-Semite” from the rooftops—or from the depths of the blogosphere, anyway (see this knee-jerk entry at Israpundit).

According to the concentration camp apologist Michelle Malkin, Sheehan is a dupe for “the far Left and in the MSM” (translation: the “MSM,” or mainstream media, read corporate media, reported this story, so they are complicit in the treasonous plot to bring the troops home). As Ms. Malkin sees it, the “Cindy Sheehan juggernaut has resulted in an uptick in profanity-laced moonbat hate mail from Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers incapable of rational debate.” In other words, arguing that the Iraq invasion and occupation is an untenable disaster indicates one is “incapable of rational debate” (as defined by Malkin and the neocons) and opposition to such lunacy as killing 140,000 (give or take 10 or 20 thousand) innocent Iraqis predicated on a stinking passel of lies is a symptom of the “Bush Derangement Syndrome.” However, it would appear Malkin suffers from a mental illness of her own—not uncommon in Bushzarro world—because she believes the “MSM” is infiltrated with America-hating leftists (for instance, the American-hating folks at General Electric, who manufacture jet engines for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and other military aircraft makers, and also own and control NBC, CNBC, Telemundo, and msnbc.com).

But anyway, the point here is that you cannot avoid reality—even from the murky depths of Bushzarro world where the Michelle Malkin apologists for mass murder and forever-war reside. I keep citing the following news article as a primary example of how indeed the invasion and occupation of Iraq is in Israel’s interest (War Launched to Protect Israel - Bush Adviser) but this fact is studiously ignored. It is also well-established that the invasion of Iraq was pushed by the likes of neocon “think tanks” such as PNAC, as Sheehan notes, and also the American Enterprise Institute, Middle East Media Research Institute, Hudson Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Middle East Forum, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Center for Security Policy, and others less influential. Again, this is not some Elders of Zion conspiracy theory but established fact (for more detail, see Jason Vest, The Men From JINSA and CSP).

On February 19, 1998, in an “Open Letter to the President,” the Machiavellian neocon Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf proposed “a comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime,” in other words killing even more Iraqis than they had killed up to that point (around a million, half of them children, through medieval sanctions). “Among the letter’s signers were the following current Bush administration officials,” notes Stephen J. Sniegoski. “Elliott Abrams (National Security Council), Richard Armitage (State Department), Bolton (State Department), Feith (Defense Department), Fred Ikle (Defense Policy Board), Zalmay Khalilzad (White House), Peter Rodman (Defense Department), Wolfowitz (Defense Department), David Wurmser (State Department), Dov Zakheim (Defense Department), Perle (Defense Policy Board), and Rumsfeld (Secretary of Defense). In 1998 Donald Rumsfeld was part of the neocon network and already demanding war with Iraq…. Signers of the letter also included such pro-Zionist and neoconservative luminaries as Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Gaffney (Director, Center for Security Policy), Joshua Muravchik (American Enterprise Institute), Martin Peretz (editor-in-chief, The New Republic), Leon Wieseltier (The New Republic), and former Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-N.Y.).” Such facts are easily obtained and hardly constitute a crack-brained conspiracy theory, as some allege. Fact of the matter is pro-Zionist neocons engineered the invasion of Iraq and Cindy Sheehan is absolutely correct (and allow me to add): her son died for a gaggle of racist and hateful chicken hawk Likudnik-lovers bent on “reshaping” the Muslim Middle East (i.e., destroying Islamic societies and culture).

Of course, for the neocons—ensconced in the Bush administration and their right-wing funded foundations, or criminal organizations—the invasion and occupation of Iraq is only the beginning. If they have their way more Casey Sheehans will be slaughtered (and thousands, possibly millions, of Muslims). Just so we understand where the Straussian neocon Machiavellian clash of civilizations crowd stands, consider the following, penned by the dynamic duo of all-war-all-the-time, Robert Kagan and William Kristol, in 2002:

When all is said and done, the conflict in Afghanistan will be to the war on terrorism what the North Africa campaign was to World War II: an essential beginning on the path to victory. But compared with what looms over the horizon—a wide-ranging war in locales from Central Asia to the Middle East and, unfortunately, back again to the United States—Afghanistan will prove but an opening battle…. But this war will not end in Afghanistan. It is going to spread and engulf a number of countries in conflicts of varying intensity. It could well require the use of American military power in multiple places simultaneously. It is going to resemble the clash of civilizations that everyone has hoped to avoid.

As Sniegoski notes, we can only conclude, considering the facts (and follow the above link to Sniegoski’s article to get the whole story), “not only that the neoconservatives are obviously in the forefront of the pro-war bandwagon but also that pro-Israeli Likudnik motives are the most logical, probably the only logical, motives for war,” although, the “deductions drawn” from Sniegoski’s essay “seem obvious but are rarely broached in public because Jewish power is a taboo subject. As the intrepid Joseph Sobran puts it: ‘It’s permissible to discuss the power of every other group, from the Black Muslims to the Christian Right, but the much greater power of the Jewish establishment is off-limits.’”

Cindy Sheehan has broached this taboo—and with millions of people watching—and this is driving the neocons and right-wingers bonkers, as Malkin’s nonsensical blog entry demonstrates. Meanwhile, feeling threatened and pissed off that the “liberal” media (owned by war profiteers such as General Electric) would even give Sheehan one sound bite, the rabid right-wingers have mobilized. “Demonstrators backing President Bush’s war on terrorism [or war on dark-skinned Muslims] traveled to Crawford, Texas, on Friday and Saturday—as the media continued to focus on Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan’s anti-war protest outside Bush’s ranch,” reports NewsMax. “On Saturday, reinforcements arrived in the form of ‘The Heart of Texas’ Chapter of FreeRepublic.com, which staged a support-the-troops rally that drew 250 people, according to WCBS Newsradio 880.”

FreeRepublic is the freedom-loving web site or forum that loves to drop a dime on the FBI, CIA, and IRS and rat out people like Justin Raimondo who they love to hate (and hate is their raison detre). Considering how the “Freepers” consistently target activists (they are fond of calling clergy and church-based activists who disagree with them “commies”) it is entirely possible there will be a lot of screaming and confrontation when this contingent arrives in Crawford, a few miles from Bush’s faux cowboy ranch.

Any “violence” will, of course, bring an end to Cindy Sheehan’s embarrassing protest and Bush’s stubborn refusal to meet Sheehan—and no doubt such an outcome will bring a smile to the face of Michelle Malkin and Matt Drudge and neocons far and wide who—like vampires—hate the light of day.

38 Comments

Germans Wary of Dubya the Destroyer
Sunday August 14th 2005, 8:46 am
Filed under: Politics
Gerhard Schroeder, German chancellor, wants nothing to do with Bush’s latest round of saber-rattling against Iran. “Let’s take the military option off the table. We have seen it doesn’t work,” Schroeder told Social Democrats at a rally in Hanover, the BBC reports. Schroeder told the German weekly Bild am Sonntag Bush’s military threats are “extremely dangerous” and Bush and his crew of neocon psychopaths can “exclude any participation by the German government under my direction.” According to the BBC, however, Schroeder is laying on the anti-war rhetoric because he is behind in the polls. In 2002, carping about the impending Iraq invasion gave Schroeder a boost in the polls. In other words, Gerhard Schroeder is simply another politician exploiting anti-war sentiment in Europe, or so it would seem if you read the BBC web site. Never mind that the vast majority of the people in the world (with the exception of the Americans and Israelis) are afraid of Bush’s death-dealing juggernaut.

Meanwhile, the Iranians are not taking Bush’s latest threats—issued during a Q and A on Israeli television nonetheless—lightly: “Iran notched up the rhetorical battle with the United States on Sunday, declaring its options, if attacked by Washington, far exceeded those of the Americans,” reports the Associated Press. “I think Bush should know that our options are more numerous than the U.S. options,” said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi. “If the United States makes such a big mistake, then Iran will definitely have more choices to defend itself.” The Associated Press commented: “He offered no specifics but characterized Bush’s words as part of an ongoing psychological war against Iran.”

Asefi did not need to offer specifics. Obviously, when the United States attacks Iran, all hell will break loose in the neighborhood. As I noted in February, quoting a report in the Boston Globe, “Iran has begun publicly preparing for a possible US attack, announcing efforts to bolster and mobilize recruits in citizens’ militias and making plans to engage in the type of ‘asymmetrical’ warfare that has plagued American troops in neighboring Iraq.” According to Wayne Madsen’s sources (within the German Federal Intelligence Service), the U.S. will hit Iran with “heavy saturation bombing using bunker buster bombs and tactical nuclear weapons” and on the ground against urban and rural critical infrastructure through “sabotage carried out by elements of the People’s Mujaheddin (MEK), Pentagon Special Operations units, and other Iranian dissident groups.”

Iran knows where the rhetorical source stems from—Israel and the Israel-centric neocons in the United States—and thus has declared that if they are attacked they will respond in kind against Israel. “Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said Iranians would ‘crush’ Israel if it attacked the Persian state,” the China Daily reported last August. “Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani, upped the ante … telling Al-Jazeera television that his government might launch pre-emptive strikes to protect its nuclear facilities if they were threatened.

Of course, all of this may be little more than part of the ongoing psychological warfare between the United States and Iran at the behest of the Likudites and their operatives in the Bush administration. It is significant, however, that Bush directed his comments toward the Israeli public. Sharon and his cabal of right-winger Likudites have pounded the war drums against Iran for years and Bush’s comments were likely embraced by many in Israel, although the Israeli public, not unlike the American public, remains largely clueless when it comes to the murderous intention of their government. Sharon and the Machiavellian neocons sincerely want to invade Iran and kill thousands of Iranians.

But Gerhard Schroeder and the Germans may know something we don’t, as Madsen’s sources seem to indicate. Schroeder seems to be inserting distance between himself and Bush as Bush pitches another propaganda hard ball in preparation for what may turn out to be the all-out “saturation” bombing of Iran’s “nuclear program” (i.e., Iran’s civilian infrastructure, similar to what Bush did in Iraq, with devastating results).

For most Americans, the fact that the United States is slowly moving toward another Iraqi disaster in Iran does not even register on the intellectual radar screen. More Americans know and pay attention to the vapid proclamations of Jessica Simpson who tells a “Simpson-breast-craving world” that “mine are definitely real.”

11 Comments

Clarifying Bush: I Will Kill Iranians
Saturday August 13th 2005, 8:34 am
Filed under: Politics
In Bushzarro world, when our potentate speaks, translation is often required. For instance, when Bush fielded questions from the corporate media at the faux cowboy ranch in Crawford, he responded to a question about Iran from an Israeli public television reporter as follows: “All options are on the table.” Of course, this means the Bushcons are considering bombing the dickens out of Iranian school kids and grandmothers. “The use of force is the last option for any president. You know we have used force in the recent past to secure our country.”

For this president, “force” (i.e., wanton mass murder) is the only option when dealing with Muslims. As for securing “our country,” it remains to be seen how making up a passel of lies about nukes and Saddam hobnobbing with Osama accomplished this—but then the invasion and subsequent occupation were not about making America safe, although the perception held by some is that it made Israel safe (see the comments of Philip Zelikow, executive director of the nine eleven white wash commission). Bush used the weapons of mass destruction ruse to kill thousands and thousands of Iraqis. Ditto Iran—in due time.

As Mike Whitney pointed out earlier this week, the “facts about Iran’s ‘alleged’ nuclear weapons program have never been in dispute. There is no such program and no one has ever produced a shred of credible evidence to the contrary…. Iran has no nuclear weapons program. This is the conclusion of Mohammed el-Baradei the respected chief of the IAEA. The agency has conducted a thorough and nearly-continuous investigation on all suspected sites for the last two years and has come up with the very same result every time; nothing.” In Bushzarro world, however, not having nukes means you have nukes. No matter what the Iranians do, they will be attacked.

Ace researcher Wayne Madsen provides details:

According to sources within the German Federal Intelligence Service (Bundesnachrichtendienst - BND), the Bush administration has drawn up plans to hit Iran’s nuclear, other WMD, and military sites with heavy saturation bombing using bunker buster bombs and tactical nuclear weapons. The attack will be coordinated with urban and rural critical infrastructure sabotage carried out by elements of the People’s Mujaheddin (MEK), Pentagon Special Operations units, and other Iranian dissident groups. The German intelligence comes from classified briefings provided by elements within the CIA that are concerned the neocons in the Bush administration will, in attacking Iran, set off a chain of events that will lead to world war.

And “world war” (or as the neocons call it, world war IV) is exactly what Bush and crew desire. “This fourth world war, I think, will last considerably longer than either World Wars I or II did for us. Hopefully not the full four-plus decades of the Cold War,” former CIA director (and PNACite and JINSAite) James Woolsey said in early 2003 (parroting his neocon buddy and fellow Defense Policy Board member Eliot Cohen, according to Right Web). “Only fear will re-establish [Arab] respect for us…. We need a little bit of Machiavelli.” (Quoted in the Glasgow Sunday Herald, April 13, 2003.) Niccolo Machiavelli, of course, believed the ends justify the means and “the worst and most treacherous acts of the ruler are justified,” as the historian Steven Kreis puts it. In other words, in order to get your way, it’s perfectly legitimate to start a world war, no matter millions of people may be killed.

“The Iranians refused to comply with the demands of the free world, which is: do not, in any way shape or form, have a program that could lead to a nuclear weapon,” Bush continued. “In this particular instance, the EU three—Britain, France and Germany—have taken the lead in helping to send the message, a unified message to the Iranians…. In all these instances we want diplomacy to work and so we are working feverishly on the diplomatic route and, you know, we will see if we are successful or not. As you know I’m skeptical.” Bushzarro translation: Bush and his neocon taskmasters have long planned to attack Iran and allowing the Europeans to send “unified message” is another ruse to buy time.

Of course, the impending attack and mass murder in Iran has nothing to do with the Europeans or their squeamishness about illusory nukes in Iran. As usual, it is about Israel and the neocon plan to slice and dice up the Middle East, eviscerate Muslim societies and culture, and fine tune the “new and improved” neoliberal approach to dominating “markets” through wholesale destruction and mass murder.

33 Comments

First They Came for Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri
Friday August 12th 2005, 2:21 pm
Filed under: Politics
If Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri didn’t hate the United States, as the FBI claims he does, before he was abducted in December, 2001, and accused of acting as an al-CIA-duh “sleeper cell,” he probably does now. On August 8, a “lawsuit filed …. against U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reveals the gratuitous cruelty inflicted on a foreign student held without charges for more than two years as an ‘enemy combatant’ in a South Carolina naval brig, Human Rights Watch said,” reports Reuters. “Although three men have been confined in the United States after being designated ‘enemy combatants’ by President George Bush, the complaint by Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri provides the first look into the treatment of any of them in military custody.”

Al-Marri alleges his captors—who apparently plan to keep him locked up in a military brig until the engineered war on Islamic societies and culture is over (a generation or two)—are sadistic sub-humans who get their jollies inflicting humiliation and privation upon him. Jamie Fellner, director of Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Program, tells Reuters:

“It is bad enough that al-Marri has been held indefinitely without charges and incommunicado…. Now we learn that his life in the brig has also been one of cruelty and petty vindictiveness. Whatever the Bush administration believes he has done or wanted to do, there’s no excuse for how they are treating him.”

Note the disgusting particulars:

Al-Marri’s complaint describes virtually complete isolation from the world. He has been confined round the clock in a small cell with an opaque window covered with plastic. He has not been allowed to speak to his wife or five children. He is allowed no newspapers, magazines, books (other than the Koran), radio or television. He is allowed no personal property. His cell contains a steel bed, a sink and a toilet. During the day, the mattress on his bed has been removed.

Out-of-cell time has been limited to three showers and three short periods of solitary recreation a week-but al-Marri has frequently been denied that out-of-cell time. Once he went 60 days without being permitted to leave his cell at all. When bad weather prevents him from going outside, he must remain in hand cuffs and leg irons during his indoor recreation. Leg irons and handcuffs are placed on him when he goes to the shower.

Al-Marri alleges that on occasion he has been denied basic hygiene products such as a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and toilet paper. When not provided with toilet paper, he has had to use his hands to clean himself after he defecates, and it has taken more than an hour before soap was brought to him so that he could wash his hands. The water in his cell has frequently been turned off. He has been denied socks or footwear for months at a time, including during the winter months. Officers at the brig often lower the temperature in his cell until it becomes exceedingly cold, but they do not give him extra clothes or blankets to keep warm.

(…)

Al-Marri also claims he has been denied appropriate care for medical and mental health symptoms he has developed while in the brig. Prolonged solitary confinement pushes the boundary of what humans can psychologically tolerate. It can cause serious mental damage.

As an “enemy combatant” (i.e., he can be treated like a caged animal), al-Marri has yet to see the inside of a courtroom, or does it appear the sadist Bush will ever allow him to have his day in court. It took years before the government finally agreed to let him have access to counsel.

“In 2003, President Bush designated al-Marri an enemy combatant, and shortly before his criminal trial was to begin, the criminal charges against him were dismissed, and he was sent to the Consolidated Naval Brig in North Charleston, South Carolina.” Of course, all of this is an egregious violation of international law, but then Bush and his clash of civilizations (or eradication of certain civilizations and “failed states,” i.e., states where Muslims live) taskmasters don’t do international law.

Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri is being confined and tortured—like the unfortunates at Camp Gitmo and Abu Ghraib in Iraq—because he is an Arab (from Qatar) and a devout Muslim. Al-Marri’s treatment is a microcosm of the treatment the hate-mongering and demented neocons (and their reactionary right-wing fellow travelers in Congress) want to inflict on approximately 2 billion Muslims (of every four humans in the world, one of them is Muslim).

Of course, this sort of sadism will not stop with Muslims. In the not too distant future, it can be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy (if history serves) that the neocon globalists (a rather malevolent strain or faction under the neoliberal rubric) will use the same depravity against their non-Muslim enemies—that is to say, anybody who disagrees with them or resists the neolib-transnational Cosa Nostra.

Or maybe you think I’m suffering from “political paranoia” (now considered a mental illness). If so, consider t he following: the Security Act of 1950, Rex 84 (containing an emergency civilian detention plan, as sketched out by the Iran-Contra criminal Oliver North), Operation Cable Splicer, Garden Plot (also known as United States Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2), and of course the documented fact there are more than 800 FEMA camps spread out around the country. In order to give this noxious brew a bit more substance, do a bit of reading on COINTELPRO and a few other history lessons, such as the Palmer Raids (a perfect example of American citizens arrested and held without charge en masse), or do a Google search on Executive Orders 11000 through 11004.

Eventually, the sadistic abuse meted out against Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri will be used against ordinary citizens (it should be noted that José Padilla, an American citizen, is being held indefinitely and without charge in a military brig under the orders of the Constitution-crunching potentate Bush, so people should not think that because they were born here, are not Muslim, they are immune to kidnapping and spending the rest of their lives in a dungeon or the sort of remote concentration camps advocated by the likes of the “conservative” Michelle Malkin).

Consider it a done deal on the day after the next big terrorist attack (we are incessantly promised it is not a matter of if but when) hits America. Remember, Rex 84 was, according to Wikipedia, designed to “accommodate the detention of large numbers of American citizens during times of emergency” (i.e., an al-CIA-duh false flag operation) in “an undisclosed number of concentration camps …. set in operation throughout the United States, for internment of dissidents and others potentially harmful to the state.”

16 Comments

Martial Law: Chertoff to the Rescue
Thursday August 11th 2005, 1:51 pm
Filed under: Politics
Fear Not. Michael Chertoff, Ministry of Homeland Security head honcho and longtime member and activist in the Federalist Society (self-described as a “cabal against the libs” to push justices toward the reactionary far right), informs us that in the event there are (fake) terror attacks in America, he will be at the helm, not the neocon hired guns over at the Pentagon. I don’t know about you, but this sure the heck doesn’t make me feel any better. “The Department of Homeland Security has the responsibility under the president’s directives to coordinate the entirety of the response to a terrorist act here in the United States,” Chertoff said on CNN, according to the Baltimore Sun. Never mind that there will be no genuine terrorist attacks, only al-CIA-duh attacks when and if our neocon masters and their semi-moronic chieftain decide the time is right. Chertoff’s flaccid reassurance is of course predicated on “Defense” Department plans to declare martial law in response to “15 possible scenarios… such as the July 7 [false flag] bombings in London.”

Chertoff isn’t fooling us, though. His declaration not to allow the military to take over the country is simply a smoke screen for the fact such would be a direct and egregious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, forbidding the military to take on duties otherwise assigned to local and state police (although, as of late, considering the militarization of law enforcement around the country, there really will not be much difference). Posse Comitatus was enacted in response to jackbooted abuses perpetuated during the fifteen year military occupation by the US Army in the post-Civil War South. Over the years, however, Posse Comitatus has been weakened, most notably during the phony “war on drugs” (i.e., the CIA and the government imported drugs, created a crisis of addiction and misery, and then responded by chipping away at civil liberties and Posse Comitatus—a classic example of the Hegelian dialectic if ever there was one). 18 USC 831, for all intents and purposes, murdered the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878—it allows the Attorney General to request that the Secretary of Defense provide emergency assistance if civilian law enforcement is inadequate to address certain types of threat involving the release of nuclear materials, such as potential use of a nuclear or radiological weapon (and thus we will probably experience a radiological event in the near future).

Leave it up to the corporate media to make excuses. “Article 2 of the Constitution, which designates the president as commander-in-chief of the armed forces and charges him with protecting the nation, theoretically allows him to deploy troops inside the United States. Actions authorized by the Constitution do not fall under the Posse Comitatus Act,” speculates Nicole Gaouette for the Los Angeles Times (supposedly a “liberal” newspaper). “The use of military troops under civilian authority in times of emergency has a long history, such as in the aftermath of natural disasters. Security specialists outside the government said the plans did not appear to be a substantive break with past practice.”

In other words, according to the ink slingers at the Los Angeles Times, it is perfectly American for jackbooted SWAT-garbed thugs to break down your door, search your house for weapons or contraband, traumatize your kids, and “shoot-to-kill” you (as is logical under martial law) for insisting there (was once) something called the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. Obviously, Ms. Gaouette has no knowledge of the maxim that declares ‘’every man’s house is his castle,” demonstrated by the Semayne’s Case, decided in 1603, or that our own revolution was based in good part upon the idea that “writs of assistance” (generalized warrants) were illegal and the King’s agents had no right to search and seize property without probable cause. ‘’The rights to be secured in their persons, their houses, their papers, and their other property, from all unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated by warrants issued without probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, or not particularly describing the places to be searched, or the persons or things to be seized,” wrote James Madison. Under military dictatorship and martial law, no “oath or affirmation” is required.

“Obviously the Department of Defense has certain capabilities, including the ability to put a lot of hospitals and a lot of personnel in the field, which would be critical if we had a truly mass event,” Chertoff said on CNN’s The Situation Room. In fact, what Chertoff meant to say is the Department of Perpetual War has “certain capabilities” when it comes to rounding up dissidents, people who demand the Constitution be enforced, rabble-rousers who consider Bush a war criminal, and throwing them all in FEMA camps. If the government seriously cared about the welfare of the people, they would not have allowed nine eleven to happen (and the “intelligence failure” excuse is precisely that, an excuse) and if the Pentagon cared about the people they would not have planned Operation Northwoods, a series of terrorist events targeting the American people, who they consider chattel, or at best collateral damage.

“Throughout any homeland emergency, Homeland Security would play the role of quarterback, organizing and directing the response,” James A. Carafano, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation (i.e., the radical far right “think tank” that devised the very idea of creating the Ministry of Homeland Security) told the clueless Los Angeles Times. “The responsibility is at the local level, and the state and federal assets that come are in support. In 9/11 [New York Mayor Rudolph W.] Giuliani was the guy in charge.” Indeed, he was in charge of selling thousands of pounds of nine eleven debris (otherwise know as evidence) to India, Japan, South Korea, China, and Malaysia. Forbid an authoritarian presidential wanna-be like Giuliani is appointed to call the shots in my town on the day state-sponsored terrorists light off a nuke or two.

Michael Chertoff is no friend of the American people. “As the architect of the post-September 11th initiatives on the domestic war on terror, Chertoff supervised the round-up of 750 Arabs and other Muslims on suspicion of immigration violations,” notes Right Web. “Treated as suspected terrorist sympathizers or material witnesses, the ’suspects’ were held without bond for as long as three months, often in solitary confinement, despite having never been charged with any crime. Eventually, most were released or deported after secret tribunals.” As the author Steven Brill explains, Chertoff obstructed the access by the post-nine eleven detainees to lawyers, reasoning that they “could be questioned without lawyers present because they were not being charged with any crime.” In other words, Chertoff is the perfect “guy in charge” come the day Bush and his coterie of chickenhawk Straussian neocons declare martial law in the wake of a staged terror attack. It doesn’t matter if Chertoff sits in a DHS office or one in the Pentagon.

23 Comments

General Byrnes: Our Smedley Butler?
Thursday August 11th 2005, 6:34 am
Filed under: Politics
I have often wondered why people in the military have not risen up and pulled off a coup against the Straussian neocon warmonger faction in the Pentagon. It’s said the brass in the U.S. military does not want to jeopardize their careers and pensions—in other words, we are expected to believe everybody in the military without exception is a self-seeking careerist unable to realize that the neocon vision will result in a situation where a career and pension will be meaningless (a post-nuclear war retirement is untenable). Well, if reports are correct, one soldier, the head of Fort Monroe’s Training and Doctrine Command, four star general Kevin P. Byrnes, was fired for standing up to the neocons, although the corporate media insists he was dismissed for “sexual misconduct.”

Others, however, insist Byrnes was fired for organizing against the neocon warmongers. “According to reporter Greg Szymanski, anonymous military sources said that Brynes was the leader of a faction that was preparing to instigate a coup against the neo-con hawks in an attempt to prevent further global conflict,” write Paul Joseph Watson and Alex Jones. I am reminded of Smedley Darlington Butler, the most decorated marine in U.S. history, who told the Congress in 1933 that a failed coup had been plotted by plutocratic industrialists to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Butler was an outspoken critic of war profiteering (see War is a Racket) and what he saw as creeping fascism in the United States.

I sincerely doubt Byrnes is another Butler. However, if he was indeed the leader of a faction opposed to the Straussian-Machiavellian neocons, who want to nuke Iran (and possibly a city in America—under cover of a JTF-CS exercise—as a pretext to start their version of the 30 Years’ War), we can hold out at least a modicum of hope in the realization that the military does not consist solely of self-seekers and warmongering psychopaths.

51 Comments

Magdy al-Nashar is Afraid of British Blood Lust
Wednesday August 10th 2005, 6:04 pm
Filed under: Politics
Can you blame Magdy al-Nashar for being afraid? He was falsely accused by the British government of participation in the London bombings and now is afraid to return to Britain. “Magdy al-Nashar, 33, said that he wants to resume his work and life but fears the British public still regard him as a terror suspect,” reports the Times Online. “How are people going to know about my innocence? What can I do? Tell each person on the street I am innocent to avoid that an angry person unexpectedly attacks me?” According to the Islamic Human Rights Commission, which monitors racist violence against Muslims in Britain, there was a 13-fold increase in incidents four years ago, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. “Figures published by Scotland Yard on Tuesday showed a 600 percent increase in faith-hate crimes since the first attack on July 7 compared with the same period one year ago. At the same time there have been increasing complaints from young Asian men that they are being singled out for police searches,” reports the International Herald Tribune. Magdy el-Nashar’s fear and the grim stats on violence against Muslims are good news for the neocon clash of civilizations crowd. It means their despicable rhetoric and faux terror attacks are working on the public psyche like a slow but persistent acid. One or two more engineered terror attacks and the masses will be ready to plunge headlong into the New 30 Years’ War. It should be noted that the first 30 Years’ War (1618-1648) resulted in the Peace of Westphalia and initiated modern diplomacy between states, a tenet currently under attack by the neocon miscreants. In 30 years (recall our warmongering leaders declaring the “war against terrorism” will last a generation or more) we may be in the mood to initiate another Peace of Westphalia—that is if the sociopaths currently in control of the government have not destroyed the biosphere and thus all of humanity.

7 Comments

Angry, Isolated Sting Op Victims
Wednesday August 10th 2005, 3:04 pm
Filed under: Politics
It’s not only al-CIA-duh, mind you. It’s also “angry, isolated men” who present a threat to society and must be hunted down, arrested, and imprisoned. “Slumping in his prison clothes and pallid from a year behind bars, Shahawar Matin Siraj didn’t look like much of a threat as he silently endured a routine hearing in federal court this month,” reports the Associated Press. “But the 23-year-old Pakistani immigrant stands accused of a scheme to attack a busy New York subway station with bombs hidden in backpacks.” Of course, as usual, things are not on the up-and-up in regard to Siraj and his co-defendant James Elshafay.

“Siraj was working at an Islamic bookstore in Brooklyn when he was approached in 2003 by an Egyptian-born police informant. The informant spent months secretly monitoring Siraj and his co-defendant James Elshafay. As a result, police say they have recordings of the two men and the informant discussing how attacks on three spots—the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and subway stations at Herald Square near Macy’s and next to Bloomingdale’s on Manhattan’s East Side—could damage the economy as part of a holy war against the United States.” Defense attorney Khurrum Wahid “described Siraj as a hardworking immigrant entrapped by an informant who whipped his client into a rage over abuses against Muslims like the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq…. ‘He manages to convince them that they need to do something,’ Wahid said. ‘He puts the idea of attacking the United States into their head.’” In short, the two men are victims of a sting operation.

In the old days, before “everything changed,” the police and the judiciary were required to follow certain rules when conducting sting operations—for instance, the operations could be “mounted only against persons against whom some evidence of criminality already exists and a sting operation is considered necessary for getting conclusive evidence,” as B. Raman of the South Asia Analysis Group notes. Of course, these days, all Arabs and south Asians are considered suspicious, potential terrorists, especially if they hold strong opinions about the torture of women and children in Bush’s gulag, as Siraj apparently did in relation to Abu Ghraib. How many people would be considered terrorists if they were incited to anger by police informants? Millions.

Regardless of what you think of the ethics behind this particular police sting operation or the absurd charge that Siraj and Elshafay are dangerous terrorists as opposed to mere hotheads, the corporate media has, in the wake of the London “suicide bombings,” jumped on this story like white on rice in a continued effort to convince us that we are surrounded by jihadists who hate us (and want to kill us) simply for our freedoms. Moreover, this story and its “lone wolf” angle are custom-made for the corporate media, addicted to sensationalism.

“Besides the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the attack of Sept. 11, 2001, the nation’s most significant terrorist plots and attacks were by men acting alone or in pairs without ties to known radical networks, said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corporation,” the Associated Press continues (note: the Rand corporation, set up by the Air Force in 1948, shares an interlocking relationship with such globalist operations as the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations, and two-thirds of its “research” consists of “national security” issues). These scary lone wolves “include Theodore Kacyznski, Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, as well as Palestinian-born Ali Abu Kamal, who shot a group of tourists at the Empire State Building in 1997, killing one. Others include Egyptian immigrant Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, who opened fire at an El Al ticket counter in Los Angeles in 2002, killing two.” Although Hoffman said he believes a more ominous threat is presented by al-CIA-duh, he still buys into the absurd lone wolf theory. “The lone wolf, when influenced by day-to-day events, is harder to stop, harder to know about, much more difficult to defend against.”

Indeed, especially when the so-called lone wolves are easily aroused to anger over the horror of U.S. foreign policy and are careless enough to fantasize about violence in the presence of strangers who are in fact police informers.

4 Comments

Atta’s Green Card and the Bush Whitewash Commission
Wednesday August 10th 2005, 12:59 pm
Filed under: Politics
Bush nine eleven whitewash commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton is in a pickle. As noted here yesterday, the Department of Perpetual War put the finger on the psychopath cat-killer and lap dance addict patsy Mohammed Atta and his al-CIA-duh terror cell (including Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar, and Nawaf al-Hazmia) a full year before the nine eleven attacks and did nothing about it (in fact, they made sure not to inform the FBI) and the rest is history, including the murder of nearly 3,000 innocent humans. “The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell,” said Hamilton. “Had we learned of it obviously it would’ve been a major focus of our investigation.” No doubt Mr. Hamilton is relieved this bit of crucial info did not emerge when he and his co-cover-uppers were “investigating” selective material, otherwise they would have been forced to hurriedly rationalize yet another red flag (as an “intelligence failure”) or ignore it completely, as they ignored just about everything else.

As Sen. Max Cleland, who resigned from the whitewash commission, said at the time, “As each day goes by we learn that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before September 11 than it has ever admitted…. Let’s chase this rabbit into the ground. They had a plan to go to war and when 9/11 happened that’s what they did; they went to war.” In non-Bushzarro world, a sincere investigation would have mentioned not only the drive to war, but historical precedent and cause and effect—for instance, the indisputable fact the United States created what the government and the corporate media now call “al-Qaeda” (as Bev Conover notes, “Osama bin Laden was the CIA’s point man in Afghanistan, during the time the Reagan administration was bent on pushing the Soviets out of that country. Nor does the commission note that al Qaeda is a creature of the CIA, born out of the Afghan Mujahadeen”), or is the fact mentioned that the U.S. has considered covert terrorist attacks in the past (i.e., Operation Northwoods), or did it consider the awful fishy fact the WTC evidence was carted away and sold as scrap well before any investigation commenced (same thing happened in Oklahoma City), or did it dare address the absurd theory that a Boeing 757 (over 124 feet from wingtip to wingtip and, including the tail, over 44 feet high) fit into a impossibly small hole in the Pentagon (see this photo illustration).

As evidence that Bush’s whitewash commission had absolutely no interest in the fact Atta was in the United States, plotting the nine eleven attacks (as micromanaged patsies), Fox News reports the following: “[Rep. Curt Weldon] told FOX News on Wednesday that staff members of the Sept. 11 commission were briefed at least once by officials on Able Danger [the intelligence op that discovered the “al-CIA-duh” cell], but that he does not believe the message was sent to the panel members themselves. He also said some phone calls made by military officials with Able Danger to the commission staff went unreturned,” hardly surprising since the Bush whitewash commission was specifically tasked with covering up the truth and rolling out a “magic bullet” theory of cave-dwelling medieval Muslims being responsible for the highly coordinated attacks.

“A group of Sept. 11 widows called the September 11th Advocates issued a statement Wednesday saying they were ‘horrified’ to learn that further possible evidence exists, and they are disappointed the Sept. 11 commission report is ‘incomplete and illusory,’” and obvious understatement, to say the least. No doubt the September 11th Advocates—indeed the entire country—would be “horrified” to learn the truth surrounding nine eleven: it was a rogue intelligence black op, a classic false flag operation, designed to blackmail Bush and move the country closer to a dictatorship and jackbooted police state and, as well, advance the neocon clash of civilizations agenda for domination in the Middle East (through “World War IV,” as the neocons fondly refer to plan to attack Islamic societies and “reshape” Muslim nations such as Iran and Syria) and also send a message to North Korea, China, Russia, and any other state, especially in Asia or where there are natural resources the neolibs, multinational corporations, and bankers want to steal.

12 Comments

Nine Eleven Plot Almost Derailed in 2000
Tuesday August 09th 2005, 10:19 pm
Filed under: Politics
How much more evidence do we need that false flag terrorist operations are being run out of the Pentagon, more than likely by rogue DIA operatives plugged into a larger network (CIA, MI6, and Mossad)? Not much. Consider the following, posted the GSN (Government Security News) site: “In September 2000, one year before the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, a U.S. Army military intelligence program, known as ‘Able Danger,’ identified a terrorist cell based in Brooklyn, NY, one of whose members was 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta, and recommended to their military superiors that the FBI be called in to ‘take out that cell,’ according to Rep. Curt Weldon… The recommendation to bring down that New York City cell—in which two other Al Qaeda terrorists were also active—was not pursued during the weeks leading up to the 2000 presidential election, said Weldon. That’s because Mohammed Atta possessed a ‘green card’ at the time and Defense Department lawyers did not want to recommend that the FBI go after someone holding a green card.” In other words, it appears a legitimate anti-terrorism program, dubbed Able Danger, had collided with the nine eleven plot and would have derailed it if not for the absurd green card ruse and what we are expected to believe passes for political correctness.

29 Comments

Aswat and the False Flag Patsies at the Mall
Tuesday August 09th 2005, 7:49 pm
Filed under: Politics
Not to worry, says Arik Arad, the former head of Israel’s shopping mall security. “Arad told [mall] owners to forget about the stringent measures Israelis take to stave off bombings, including hand-held metal detectors, machine guns and explosives-sniffing dogs. Instead, he advised them to bolster security personnel’s ability to spot a would-be bomber, a measure more palatable to Americans,” reports NewsMax. “Suicide bombers commonly case a target before an attack to search for vulnerabilities or conduct a dry run. Homeland Security is also now offering courses on recognizing terrorist behavior to security companies that guard shopping malls.” And what exactly are the tell-tale signs of “terrorist behavior,” according to the Ministry of Homeland Security? Same as usual—”an overcoat on a warm day, a refusal to make eye contact or a tight grip on a backpack.” Of course, flagging this sort of behavior didn’t stop the London bombings, but then the subway bombs were under the train, not in backpacks, as passengers Bruce Lait and Crystal Main explained (only to be ignored by the corporate media who had a vested interest in pushing the “suicide bomber” campfire story).

On the one hand, we are told al-Qaeda is a threat to civilized nations, and on the other we learn from reading news reports that al-Qaeda “terrorists” (or rather al-CIA-duh patsies) are imbeciles who use cell phones easily tracked and clumsily attempt to light shoe bomb fuses on crowded airplanes. But none of this incompetence matters because patsy-terrorists such as Haroon Rashid Aswat are allowed to travel around the world (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Botswana, Mozambique, and South Africa) because they are intelligence assets (useful patsy idiots). Aswat “attended an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan” and supposedly became a “combat training expert” who “met Osama bin Laden,” according to the Times Online. Former Justice Department prosecutor and supposed terror expert John Loftus recently told Fox News that the so called al-Muhajiroun group, which we can safely categorize as another British intel terrorist-patsy-useful idiot group, was “the recruiting arm of Al-Qaeda in London; they specialized in recruiting kids whose families had emigrated to Britain but who had British passports. And they would use them for terrorist work.” As it turns out, al-Muhajiroun-cum-al-Qaeda (or al-CIA-duh or in this case al-MI6-duh) teamed up in Kosovo with the criminal drug-running and terrorist outfit the KLA, the preferred troublemakers and globalist agenda servants of NATO, the United States, and Britain in the Balkans.

“Many members of the Kosovo Liberation Army were sent for training in terrorist camps in Afghanistan,” James Bissett, former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, told Isabel Vincent of the National Post. “The United States, which had originally trained the Afghan Arabs during the war in Afghanistan, supported them in Bosnia and then in Kosovo,” Vincent continues. “When NATO forces launched their military campaign against Yugoslavia … to unseat Mr. Milosevic, they entered the Kosovo conflict on the side of the KLA, which had already received ’substantial’ military and financial support from bin Laden’s network, analysts say.” In other words, since Osama was a known CIA asset (a false flag patsy who thought he was waging jihad against the Great Satan), and the training camps were bankrolled by the United States and micromanaged by Pakistan’s ISI (considered the CIA’s most successful operation to date), the mujahideen operation in the Balkans was a contract job and Haroon Rashid Aswat was an employee recruited by MI6 for the clash of civilizations game plan. Aswat was apparently doing such a good job recruiting fellow patsies and setting up so-called terrorist camps, “the US Justice Department ordered the Seattle prosecutors [who wanted to throw the book at Aswat for his part in setting up terrorist camps in the United States] not to touch Aswat,” according to Loftus.

Naturally, Fox News didn’t ask why the Justice Department would allow a terrorist who supposedly met Osama bin Laden to enter the country, instead taking the Brits to task for allowing radical Muslims to harbor in their country. Of course, this mystery is easy enough to address—Aswat, like his mentor Bin Laden (and dozens of other stefordized Islamic fanatics), works for the CIA-MI6-Mossad black op alliance and was, until very recently, a useful idiot. Now, with his cover blown, Aswat will suffer the fate of other patsies and useful idiots—yesterday he sat in Belmarsh prison, southeast of London, and was marched before Bow Street magistrates, having arrived not long before on a charter jet from Zambia, where he was arrested on immigration charges.

On June 20th, an FBI affidavit charged Aswat with attempting to set up a training camp in Bly, Oregon, to train jihadists. Of course, the FBI’s affidavit is nothing short of ludicrous, considering who employed the dupe Aswat. But then, thanks to the corporate media, Aswat’s checkered past as a faithful servant (and expendable pawn) for the clash of civilization gang will be swept under the rug.

Meanwhile, here in the United States, we can expect the Ministry of Homeland Security to use the Aswat case and the London bombings to hype its draconian plans to turn the country into a police state. “An unsettling ‘Security Alert’ report in the Wall Street Journal reveals that on July 18—less than two weeks after the London subway bombings—the Homeland Security Department disseminated a collection of CIA threat assessments that listed shopping malls as among the soft targets most at risk of bomb attacks,” NewsMax reports. “Security personnel [i.e., high school dropouts paid the minimum wage] at many of the nation’s 1,200 enclosed malls have been stepping up preparations for dealing with a bomber… They included limiting the number of people entering a mall, placing metal detectors at each door and screening shoppers for weapons.” Of course, this is nothing new. On December 30, 2003, a New Jersey Star-Ledger article announced that the “Short Hills shopping center [was] now off limits for pre-opening strolls.” On that day, the mall “suspended the pre-opening walks by VIP, or Very Important Pacers, amid heightened security over the Department of Homeland Security’s orange alert.”

It was another instance of the neocon Grinches who stole Christmas.

9 Comments

Shoot to Kill: Britain Brings Home Its Dirty War
Monday August 08th 2005, 7:02 pm
Filed under: Politics
As it turns out, Jean Charles de Menezes was executed by “the Special Reconnaissance Regiment, modeled on an undercover unit that operated in Northern Ireland,” according to the Guardian. “The regiment absorbed 14th Intelligence Company, known as ‘14 Int’, a plainclothes unit set up to gather intelligence covertly on suspect terrorists in Northern Ireland. Its recruits are trained by the SAS.” Regiments.org, billed as a “historical encyclopedia,” describes the Special Reconnaissance Regiment as “formed with HQ at Hereford from volunteers of other units to support international expeditionary operations in the fight against international terrorism, absorbing 14th Intelligence Company (formed for operations against Ulster terrorists), Intelligence Corps, and releasing the SAS and SBS for the ‘hard end’ of missions.”

Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon announced the formation of the Special Reconnaissance Regiment on April 5, well before the July attacks. In addition to working in Britain, the SRR “is expected to play a key role in hunting down insurgents in Iraq and in the forthcoming UK-led operation against al-Qaeda remnants—including Osama bin Laden—in Afghanistan,” the Scotsman reported On April 6. “Members will be expected to infiltrate terrorist organizations and identify targets to be attacked by other units.”

The 14th Intelligence Company and SAS (or Special Air Service) have a sordid history, including organizing massacres of republican fighters in Northern Ireland. It should be noted that the SAS officers commanded some of the infamous “pseudo gangs” that terrorized the civilian population in Kenya during the Mau Mau rebellion (in other words, they created fake terrorist groups; see Seán Mac Mathúna, The SAS, their early days in Ireland and the Wilson Plot).

As noted in the documentary Death on the Rock, aired on the ITV network on 28 April 1988, the SAS engaged in execution of IRA members. “The program interviewed witnesses who claimed to have heard no prior warning given by the SAS troops and to have seen the shooting as one carried out ‘in cold blood,’” explains a Museum of Broadcast Communications review. “Furthermore, the defense that the IRA team might, if allowed time, have had the capacity to trigger by remote control a car bomb in the main street,” essentially the same reasoning offered after de Menezes was executed.

As Mathúna notes in the above cited piece, the “shoot to kill” policy now used in Britain against so-called “terrorists” (who are demonstrated intel op patsies) was perfected in Northern Ireland. Moreover, “Psychological warfare, including the use of black propaganda, an integral part of counter-insurgency operations, emerged in 1971 with the creation of Information Policy.” The 14th Intelligence Company played in an integral role in these destabilizing operations.

On July 25, 2004, the Telegraph reported that SRR “will at first be formed from members of a highly secret surveillance agency—the Joint Communications Unit Northern Ireland—which has worked in Ulster for more than 20 years. The unit, which worked with the SAS, MI5 and the Special Branch, perfected the art of covert surveillance in urban and rural areas and created a network of double agents who supplied the British security forces with intelligence on terrorist attacks.”

“From the early 1970s, British imperialism waged a notorious dirty war against the Republican movement in Northern Ireland as part of its efforts to maintain control of the six counties,” writes Julie Hyland. “The 14th Intelligence was one of three army-sponsored undercover squads dedicated to this aim. The others were the Force Research Unit (FRU) and 22 Squadron.” FRU, explains Neil Mackay, ran “proxy assassins” for British intelligence. “Military handlers would pass to agents inside loyalist paramilitary organizations documents—such as photographs and address details–on Sinn Fein activists, republican sympathizers, IRA men and sometimes just innocent Catholics. The agents would then give these details to loyalist gunmen [i.e., the outlawed Ulster Defense Association] who would use them to plan assassinations.”

It appears the cold-blooded execution of Jean Charles de Menezes has signaled the start of a “dirty war” on British turf against Muslims (although de Menezes was Brazilian). The SRR’s objective, according to Hilaal, posting on the Irish Indymedia site, “is to infiltrate mosques and keep Muslims under surveillance. Attempts are being made to recruit those of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean appearance, as well as Muslims and members of ethnic minorities,” as per Tony Blair’s recent promise to crack down on Muslims in Britain.

Hilaal continues:

At present recruits to the new regiment are being assessed and undergoing a six month course in covert surveillance, communications, driving skills, first aid and close-quarter battle skills. Those who pass the course will be sent on an Arabic course at the Armed Forces language school at Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. The regiment will be based in south Wales and report to the Director of Special Forces.

The unit will operate on a global basis and closely with Mossad and the C.I.A. although the bulk of its operations will be on the islands of Ireland and Britain. It will at first be formed from members of a highly secret surveillance agency—the Joint Communications Unit Northern Ireland and all three branches of the British armed forces. The Joint Communications Unit organized the massacre of three unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar in 1988 and was also behind the Loughgall massacre in County Tyrone, in 1987 where eight IRA members were ambushed and massacred.

Hilaal offers no documentation to back up his claim. However, considering the past behavior of British intelligence, the CIA, and Mossad—and the current anti-Islamic rhetoric gaining momentum in Britain in the wake of last month’s bombings (resulting in serious violence against innocent Muslims and people of south Asian heritage)—a “dirty war” on the scale (or more than likely surpassing) that waged in Ireland is a distinct possibility on the streets of London and other British cities. It is, as well, significant the SRR will also work against Iraqis (and, for all we know, against Iranians and Syrians), as the manufactured “war on terrorism” intends to disregard borders and become global in nature.

Britain is obviously serving as an incubator for things to come here in the United States where there are (for the moment) restrictions against direct military action against the citizenry. Bush pushed the envelope, peeling back the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, in October 2002 when he called in Pentagon spy planes to canvas the entire Washington area when two snipers went on a rampage. “The use of … RC-7 planes, operated by military personnel, appeared to be a brazen breach of the Posse Comitatus Act,” notes James Bovard. “But the mass panic that gripped the Washington area indicated how feeble the status of Posse Comitatus is. In the political world after 9/11, laws appear to provide far less restraint on the use of the military than in the past. Public opinion polls apparently carry far more weight than a federal statute book.”

Indeed, it can be argued the so-called Washington snipers are patsies. “On his Nationally Syndicated Radio Show, Documentary Filmmaker Alex Jones has consulted with many law enforcement and military experts, including Colonel Craig Roberts (formerly of US Army Intelligence, a former Marine Corps Sniper and the Best-selling Author of One Shot One Kill) who stated on-air that this operation could only be State-sponsored and was clearly the work of a rogue element from the top levels of global intelligence agencies. On The Alex Jones Show, Roberts said that the MO of the sniper attacks are indicative of a 2-3 man team trained in the Special Forces ambush tactics of reconnaissance, insertion, concealment and successful evasion. According to Jones’ research, the sniper team’s attack profile is consistent with US Special Forces ambush assassination tactics,” an Alex Jones press release explains.

In the months ahead, we can expect more brazen police state tactics as the global neocon-neolib elite manufacture and unleashed more false flag operations as an excuse to strip away our remaining civil liberties and militarize our society and local law enforcement. Death squads roaming the streets of London will not reduce Islamic “extremism” (much of it, as we know, created by British intelligence)—but it will send an indisputable message to average Britons and Londoners: you are living in the beginning stages of a police state. As engineered Muslim “terrorism” increases (and it will, as promised), the government’s response will be exponentially thuggish and jack-booted.

29 Comments

Israeli Spy Ring Update
Sunday August 07th 2005, 8:28 pm
Filed under: Politics
On occasion I will receive an email stating that I know nothing about Israel and the Israelis are our only friends in the Middle East. Of course, there is a pile of documentation revealing that in fact the Israelis are not our friends—the Franklin/AIPAC espionage case and, more significantly, the U.S.S. Liberty incident immediately come to mind—and may be considered a rather ruthless enemy (I cannot recall the last time Iraq or Syria attacked a U.S. ship or were caught with top secret documents in their possession). Adding a significant piece of change to the very real Israel-as-enemy ante, crack researcher Wayne Madsen has updated and consolidated information on the Israeli “art students” and “movers” spy story (a story, it should be added, almost completely ignored by the corporate media, with the exception of Fox’s Carl Cameron, although his exposé was trounced and flushed down the memory hole). “It was an intelligence operation directed against the United States and the American people. Elements of false flags, security penetrations, photographing America’s critical infrastructure, and spying on Arab cells in the United States all point to a well-coordinated operation that was tolerated by senior members of the Bush administration. The results of a three and a half year investigation now revealed,” writes Madsen in a blurb introducing The Israeli Art Students and Movers Story. It is a long document but well worth the read, although I am sure Madsen will be chalked up as a scurrilous anti-Semite for doing so.

14 Comments

Iraqi Death Squad Executes American Journalist
Sunday August 07th 2005, 3:10 pm
Filed under: Politics
It wasn’t very smart for Steven Vincent, an American writer and blogger who fancied himself a new Jack Kerouac, to run around Basra, Iraq, telling it the way he saw it. In fact, such foolhardy behavior cost Vincent his life. According to the New York Times, Vincent’s murder on August 2 “was the first time an American journalist has been attacked and killed during the war. A handful of American journalists have died in vehicle accidents or from illness.” In fact, as it now appears, Vincent was the victim of a death squad. “Suspicion for this killing,” writes Patrick Martin, “focuses not on Al Qaeda or Sunni-based insurgents, but on the police of the Shiite-based administration installed in Basra with the support of US and British occupation forces.”

As the Los Angeles Times reported, one of Vincent’s abductors was “an Interior Ministry employee,” and a witness was told it was the “duty” of the U.S.-installed puppet government to grab people off the street and murder them. “A few hours later, the journalist’s body was found dumped by a road outside the city, with multiple bullet wounds to the head. He suffered bruises to his face and shoulder, had been blindfolded and his hands were tied in front with plastic wire.” Smells like democracy to me.

Vincent’s mistake was reporting “how militias linked to … Shiite parties had attacked students, harassed women deemed in violation of strict Islamic codes of conduct, threatened local journalists, and carried out the political assassination of as many as 1,000 people, mainly Sunni Muslims, in a three-month period. He criticized the British military, the ultimate authority in Basra, for not cracking down on these activities.”

In other words, it appears the “Salvador Option” is in full swing, killing not only scads of Iraqis but American journalists as well.

Following the “Salvador Option” model, “one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads,” wrote Michael Hirsh and John Barry earlier this year, “to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called ’snatch’ operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries.” If eye witness accounts mean anything, Steven Vincent was assassinated by a paramilitary led by the Interior Ministry.

In May, the Detroit Free Press reported how a refashioned Iraqi intelligence service (or Mukhabarat in Arabic) “is not working for the Iraqi government—it’s working for the CIA,” according to Hadi al-Ameri, an Iraqi lawmaker and commander of the Badr Brigade. The Detroit Free Press continues:

The Iraqi official said the CIA recruited agents from the SCIRI, the Dawa Party, the two main Kurdish factions and two secular Arab parties: the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Accord led by Ayad Allawi, who later became the interim prime minister. This group, the prototype for an Iraqi intelligence group that represented Iraq’s diversity, became CMAD: the Collection, Management and Analysis Directorate.

When the U.S.-led occupation authority ceded power to the semi-sovereign interim government last June… the CMAD was split, with roughly half the agents going to the new Interior Ministry and the rest going to work on military intelligence in the Defense Ministry. Both ministries’ intelligence departments are led by Kurds, the most consistently U.S.-friendly group in Iraq, and report to the Iraqi prime minister. (Emphasis added.)

A “Salvador Option” pattern is now emerging in Iraq and it is targeting not only the Sunni resistance but American journalists as well. In El Salvador during the 1980s, members of the Salvadoran security services—including National police, National Guard, and Treasury Police—were trained as death squad goons by the CIA. “The CIA and military advisers have helped organize, trained, financed and advised Salvadoran army and intelligence units engaged in death squad activities and torture. Information from two well-informed sources in Salvadoran government,” writes Ralph McGehee, a former CIA employee, citing the Christian Science Monitor (5/8/1984). “Many of 50,000 Salvadorans killed in 1981-85… attributable to death squad activity.” In fact, the creation of Iraq’s CMAD follows a close parallel to similar paramilitary organizations devised in El Salvador.

“It is widely accepted, in the mainstream media and among human rights organizations, that the Salvadoran government is responsible for most of the 70,000 deaths which are the result of ten years of civil war,” writes David Kirsch for Covert Action Quarterly, Summer 1990. “The debate, however, has dwelled on whether the death squads are strictly renegade military factions or a part of the larger apparatus. The evidence indicates that the death squads are simply components of the Salvadoran military. And that their activities are not only common knowledge to U.S. agencies, but that U.S. personnel have been integral in organizing these units and continue to support their dally functioning.”

The New York Times article on the abduction and execution of Steven Vincent mentions how “Mr. Vincent had been working on a story about the role of police officers in the recent assassinations of former Baath Party officials,” but does not speculate on who may have killed the journalist, even though the Los Angeles Times mentioned an eye witness to the abduction who saw an Interior Ministry employee at the scene. Of course, if the journalists at the New York Times were worth their salt, they would have tracked down the Detroit Free Press article documenting the CIA links to the Interior Ministry. But then we cannot expect the New York Times to arrive at such conclusions.

Incidentally, Vincent was no friend of the Iraqi resistance. “He denounced all armed resistance to the US occupation of Iraq as the work of ‘Islamo-fascism’ and right-wing ‘death squads,’ and, according to the New York Times, ‘even compared his trips to Iraq to the tours taken by journalists covering the rise of fascism in Europe during the Spanish Civil War,’” an obvious absurdity for even a causal student of history. Even so, the abduction and execution of Steven Vincent is ample evidence that the CIA-Rumsfeld Pentagon black op created reactionary government of Iraq will liquidate anybody who gets in their way, be they resistance or potential allies such as Steven Vincent.

16 Comments

Huxley on Evolution: A famous moment in history + Bleier on Culture Wars

2005-12-12T11:02:00.000-08:00

Huxley on Evolution

From Garrett Hardin, Population Evolution Birth Control

A famous moment in the history of the debate about Darwin's theory of evolution occurred at Oxford in 1860. At a meeting of the British Association, Bishop Wilberforce turned to Thomas Henry Huxley and asked him whether he claimed descent from an ape on his father’s or his mother’s side.

Huxley recounted the event in a letter he wrote to a Dr. Dyster within a few months of the event, on September 9, 1860.

When I got up I spoke pretty much to the effect—that I had listened with great attention to the Lord Bishop’s speech but had been unable to discover either a new fact or a new argument in it—except indeed the question raised as to my personal predilection in the matter of ancestry—That it would not have occurred to me to bring forward such a topic as that for discussion myself, but that I was quite ready to meet the Right Rev. prelate even on that ground. If then, said, I, that question is put to me would I rather have a miserable ape for a grandfather or a man highly endowed by nature and possessing great means and influence and yet who employs those faculties and that influence for the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion—I unhesitatingly affirm my preference for the ape.

Whereupon there was unextinguishable laughter among the people, and they listened to the rest of my argument with the greatest attention… I happened to be in very good condition and said my say with perfect good temper and politeness—I assure you of this because all sorts of reports [have] been spread about e.g. that I had said I would rather be an ape than a bishop, etc.

***

On to the culture wars today. One point that I don’t see emphasized sufficiently is the impact that the Reagan Bush years (1981- 1993) had on polarizing this country and empowering the extreme right wing. Until then the right wing had at best a minor impact on abortion and church state issues.

Reagan/Bush managed to reopen settled issues, and have created the war zone we exist in today. In that connection, I was startled to see in the fascinating article from the Science Times below, that as early as 1987, a Canadian academic, Michael R. Rose, caused a riot in his Irvine classroom by introducing the basic principles of evolution. He says that pandemonium broke out.

Indeed I have difficulty imagining such a scene even today in a college classroom in California, unless he's talking about a clone of Pepperdine U. What’s going on? I wasn’t aware that the know nothings had succeeded so roundly.

-- Ronald

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

December 6, 2005
A Conversation With Michael R. Rose
Live Longer With Evolution? Evidence May Lie in Fruit Flies
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
In the 1970's, Michael R. Rose made scientific history with experiments manipulating the life spans of fruit flies.

Through selective breeding, Dr. Rose was able to create a long-lived line of creatures he called Methuselah flies. He then put his research into reverse and developed flies with much shortened life spans.

All this was accomplished within 12 generations by accelerating the evolutionary processes in a laboratory setting.

These days Dr. Rose, who is 50, breeds fruit flies at the University of California, Irvine, where he is a professor of evolutionary biology. From there, he also directs the Intercampus Research Program on Experimental Evolution for the University of California system.

Dr. Rose, who was born in Canada, was in New York recently to promote his book "The Long Tomorrow: How Advances in Evolutionary Biology Can Help Us Postpone Aging."

Q. You are an evolutionary biologist by profession. As a researcher trained mostly in Canada and England, are you astonished by the American battles over Darwinism?

A. Not since coming to California. In 1987, the first day I ever gave a class at Irvine, there was a riot in my classroom. I was introducing the basic principles of evolution, and pandemonium broke out - yelling, students pounding the tables. That was the day I learned about evolution in America.

Recently, I was watching President Bush speak on the potential bird flu epidemic. Pandemic bird flu is exactly a question of evolutionary biology because grave danger will come only if the virus evolves into a form that can spread from human to human.

Of course, Bush couldn't use the word evolution. There were a few key points where I was waiting for him to use the word. Nope! The virus would "develop" the ability to move from human to human. He couldn't use the word evolve because that's a dangerous word.

People in the United States probably don't realize they risk their lives by rejecting evolutionary biology. In the case of avian flu, this could kill people very directly. With aging, the essential tools for solving it are located in evolutionary biology.

Q. Why do scientists need to embrace evolution to do longevity research?

A. Because the common assumption is that young bodies work and then they fall apart during aging. Young bodies only work because natural selection makes them healthy enough to survive and breed.

As adults get older, natural selection stops caring about them, so we lose its benefits and our health. If you don't understand this, aging research is an unending riddle that goes around in circles.

Q. You are known in the genetics world for manipulating the life span of fruit flies. Can you describe your very famous experiment?

A. My experiment was to let my flies reproduce only at late ages. This forced natural selection to pay attention to the survival and reproductive vigor of the flies through their middle age.

The flies evolved longer life spans and greater reproduction over the next dozen generations. This showed that natural section was really the ultimate controller of aging, not some piece of biochemistry.

Q. Why was it important to manipulate the life spans of fruit flies?

A. Because it showed that aging isn't some general breakdown process, like the way cars rust. Aging is an optional feature of life. And it can be slowed or postponed.

This implies that controlling human aging does not require the violation of some absolute scientific law. Postponing human aging is not like building a perpetual motion machine or faster-than-light space travel. It is a scientifically reasonable thing to try.

This doesn't mean it will be easy, or even that it is the best thing to do with our medical resources. But it's not a completely crazy idea.

Q. How did you stop fruit flies from breeding?

A. By discarding their eggs. In my experiment, only those females who reached 50 days of age were allowed to breed.

Obviously, only those females who lived that long, and who could still breed, contributed offspring to the next generation. After about 12 generations, you had longer-lived flies.

Sometimes, journalists have said to me, "Wow, this is what all my friends are doing," and I said, "Right, that's why it's called the career woman experiment." If everybody is like the female neurologist who waits until she is established in her profession before she reproduces, and this goes on for generations, then we will evolve longer life spans - very slowly.

It would take centuries to get a really significant effect. Long before that ever happens, we will have medical interventions that will be far superior.

Q. Do you believe there is such a thing as a limited life span for humans?

A. No. Life span is totally tunable. In my lab, we tune it up and down all the time.

And it's quite clear that the human primate life span got tuned up by evolution over the course of the last few million years.

Almost certainly, we once had the life span of chimpanzees - which is half of what humans have. But we were smarter, able to kill our predators, make deadly tools, find more food, so evolution took us in hand, and we lived longer.

Q. What will it take to increase human life span from present levels?

A. There's not going to be one magic bullet where you take one pill or manipulate one gene and get to live to 500. But you could take a first step, and then another so that in 50 years' time, people take 50 or 60 pills and they live to be 200.

Leaving aside F.D.A. approval, it looks like we are about 5 to 10 years away from therapies that would add years to our present life span. For now, pharmaceuticals will be the primary anti-aging therapy.

After another 10 years or so, the implantation of cultured tissues will become common - especially skin and connective tissues. Reconstructive surgery is certain to become more effective than it is today.

Eventually, we will be able to culture replacement organs from our own cells and repair damage using nanotech machines. All of this will increase life span.

Q. What does religion have to say about all this tinkering with life span?

A. That depends on the religion. About five years ago I was at a meeting convened by the Templeton Foundation to address the ethical question of postponing human aging, and in particular, the possibility of biological immortality, as opposed to immortality in heaven.

And the Christian theologians at this meeting were clearly horrified whereas the Jewish theologian was saying, "Yes, we like this."

In East Asian cultures, you have a split between the Confucian tradition, which is very much for self-sacrifice, versus the Taoist tradition, which very much espouses the idea of living longer. So there's this split there, too.

Q. Aging research has often attracted crackpots and cranks. Why is that?

A. Because it raises hope - a dangerous thing, especially for scientists. Often scientists work on aging only later in their life when they are more worried about their own aging or death. So hope tends to corrupt their judgment.

Q. How has your own aging been proceeding?

A. I have mysterious tumors, high blood pressure, the classic spectrum of age-related deterioration. Though we're testing anti-aging drugs and supplements in my lab every day, they are not likely to benefit me much. But I never started on this to help myself.

My motivation was pure curiosity.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Laura Rozen's compendium: Iraqi death squads: who's behind them

2005-12-01T10:37:00.000-08:00

More on Iraqi death squads as a product of deliberate Pentagon (+CIA) policy. Note the link to the relevant NYT article below. The Times article is worth reading to see that the most important US newspaper is taking note of hundreds of militia style victims, and to see how they leave out any notion of USG involvement and to see how late in the game they are coming to this story: i.e.. their refusal to look into the matter for two years, despite plenty of anecdotal evidence presented in their own Sunday Magazine!! (see below), not to mention other mainstream outlets like Newsweek. And they are only writing a story now because the USG has gotten around to putting their spin on events. -- RB

Blogger Laura Rozen writes:
www.warandpiece.com

Nov 29, 2005
"The Salvador Option." Reader MV writes, "Long story why I'm so emotionally involved in this, but please read this Newsweek piece from January about internal DoD debates regarding the 'Salvador Option,' showing internal debate within the DoD about the formation of Salvador- style 'death squads' as one possible means of regaining control of Iraq. This story has gotten so little play for what it says":

Now, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Pentagon is intensively debating an option that dates back to a still-secret strategy in the Reagan administration’s battle against the leftist guerrilla insurgency in El Salvador in the early 1980s. Then, faced with a losing war against Salvadoran rebels, the U.S. government funded or supported "nationalist" forces that allegedly included so-called death squads directed to hunt down and kill rebel leaders and sympathizers. Eventually the insurgency was quelled, and many U.S. conservatives consider the policy to have been a success—despite the deaths of innocent civilians and the subsequent Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal. (Among the current administration officials who dealt with Central America back then is John Negroponte, who is today the U.S. ambassador to Iraq. Under Reagan, he was ambassador to Honduras. There is no evidence, however, that Negroponte knew anything about the Salvadoran death squads or the Iran-Contra scandal at the time. The Iraq ambassador, in a phone call to NEWSWEEK on Jan. 10, said he was not involved in military strategy in Iraq. He called the insertion of his name into this report "utterly gratuitous.")

Following that model, one Pentagon proposal would send Special Forces teams to advise, support and possibly train Iraqi squads, most likely hand-picked Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militiamen, to target Sunni insurgents and their sympathizers, even across the border into Syria, according to military insiders familiar with the discussions. It remains unclear, however, whether this would be a policy of assassination or so-called "snatch" operations, in which the targets are sent to secret facilities for interrogation. The current thinking is that while U.S. Special Forces would lead operations in, say, Syria, activities inside Iraq itself would be carried out by Iraqi paramilitaries, officials tell NEWSWEEK.

Also being debated is which agency within the U.S. government—the Defense department or CIA—would take responsibility for such an operation. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has aggressively sought to build up its own intelligence-gathering and clandestine capability with an operation run by Defense Undersecretary Stephen Cambone. But since the Abu Ghraib interrogations scandal, some military officials are ultra-wary of any operations that could run afoul of the ethics codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That, they argue, is the reason why such covert operations have always been run by the CIA and authorized by a special presidential finding. ...

So the US is no hapless bystander to the Shiite death squads we are seeing, but they are the product of deliberate Pentagon policy? Is Cambone going to be hauled before Congress or what? Talk about missing the black helicopter crowd. One cannot but long for justice for these guys. Could some forward looking European nation please arrest them next time they stop over, just to give them a scare? A little Pinochet-like unpleasant episode, if not a full fledged trial? Doesn't this country deserve to know what is being done in our name? If these guys believe in what they're doing, if they believe it's in the interest of US national security, why don't they have the courage to admit it openly? Why are they trying to organize Shiite death squads in secret? Because it would be bad for the US to be seen to be behind this policy? Or because they are concerned about their own legal vulnerability?
Update: More from Eric Umansky (who recommends journalists in Iraq try to profile one James Steele), Praktike, Needlenose, Peter Maas, No More Mister, and Bob Dreyfuss. Thanks to multiple readers.

Here's the cited entry from No More Mister Nice Blog

http://www.needlenose.com/node/view/1333

By Swopa
May 1 2005 - 12:41pm

Remember the controversy when Newsweek wrote in January that the U.S. was thinking about supporting a "Salvador option" in Iraq? Remember a month later, when the Wall Street Journal wrote about "pop-up militias" there, which I promptly surmised might be the "Salvador option" put into motion?

Well, today Peter Maass has a massive report in the New York Times Magazine that essentially confirms this. Here's his account of visiting the head of the Special Police Commandos death squad militia described by the WSJ as "catching the American military by surprise":

Adnan's office was a hive of conversation, phone calls and tea-drinking. Along with a dozen commandos, there were several American advisers in the room, including James Steele, one of the United States military's top experts on counterinsurgency. Steele honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country's brutal civil war in the 1980's. Steele's presence was a sign not only of the commandos' crucial role in the American counterinsurgency strategy but also of his close relationship with Adnan.

. . . As part of President Reagan's policy of supporting anti-Communist forces [in El Salvador in the 1980s], hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of 55 Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses.
Maass goes on to describe the U.S. role in the death squad militia's creation:

. . having been a key participant in the Salvador conflict, Steele knows how to organize a counterinsurgency campaign that is led by local forces. He is not the only American in Iraq with such experience: the senior U.S. adviser in the Ministry of Interior, which has operational control over the commandos, is Steve Casteel, a former top official in the Drug Enforcement Administration who spent much of his professional life immersed in the drug wars of Latin America.

. . . Last summer, with the security situation deteriorating, some Iraqi and American officials began to argue that the time had passed for a ''clean hands'' policy that rejected most of the experienced people who had fought for Saddam Hussein. The first official to take action was Falah al-Naqib, interior minister under the interim government of Ayad Allawi. In September, Naqib formed his own regiment, the Special Police Commandos, drawn from veterans of Hussein's special forces and the Republican Guard. As its leader, he chose General Adnan, not only because Adnan had a useful collection of colleagues from Iraq's military and security networks, but also because Adnan is Naqib's uncle.

. . . The American who was most involved in the commandos' creation was Casteel, Naqib's senior American adviser. Casteel, who previously worked for Paul Bremer in the Coalition Provisional Authority, realized that the de-Baathification policy had to be altered and that Naqib was the person to do it.
And just to show how closely tied to the Allawi regime the commandos were, it turns out that Gen. Adnan is the mastermind behind the surreality TV shows that feature "confessions" from torture victims supposed terrorists. Maass also shows us a hint of how complicit the U.S is in the commandos' familiarly Saddam-esque methods, going on a joint raid backed up by American troops led by a captain named Bennett:

The officer in charge of the raid -- a Major Falah -- now made it clear that he believed the detainee had led them on a wild-goose chase. The detainee was sitting at the side of a commando truck; I was 10 feet away, beside Bennett and four G.I.'s. One of Falah's captains began beating the detainee. Instead of a quick hit or slap, we now saw and heard a sustained series of blows. We heard the sound of the captain's fists and boots on the detainee's body, and we heard the detainee's pained grunts as he received his punishment without resistance. It was a dockyard mugging. Bennett turned his back to face away from the violence, joining his soldiers in staring uncomfortably at the ground in silence. The blows continued for a minute or so.
A similar situation occurs on another raid that Maass observes:

On March 8, I went on a series of raids with the commandos, traveling in a Humvee with Maj. Robert Rooker, an artillery officer based in Tikrit who was dispatched to Samarra to serve as my escort. . . . The target was a house outside Samarra where Najim al-Takhi, thought to be the leader of an insurgent cell, was believed to be hiding.

The commandos reached an isolated farmhouse and detained al-Takhi's son, who looked to be in his early 20's. This was an excellent catch. The son of a suspect usually knows where the suspect is hiding; if not, he can be detained and used as a bargaining chip to persuade the father to surrender.

. . . The captain pushed him against a mud wall and told everyone else to move away. Standing less than 10 feet from the young man, the captain aimed his AK-47 at him and clicked off the safety latch. He was threatening to kill him. I was close enough to catch some of the dialogue on my digital recorder.

. . . Major Rooker was just a few feet from the angry captain. He moved closer and nudged the captain's AK-47 toward the ground.

''You are a professional soldier,'' Rooker told him. ''You know and I know that you need to put the weapon down.''

. . . As the commandos pulled their prisoner away, Lieutenant Johansen conferred with Rooker. ''They don't operate the way we do, that's for damn sure,'' Johansen said. ''We have to be nice to people.'' Especially in the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, they both knew that threatening a prisoner with death ... was illegal under the Geneva Conventions.
Actually, the bitter punch line here is that taking a wanted man's son hostage is probably a violation of the Geneva Conventions, too -- which just shows how badly our troops' collective sense of right and wrong has been scrambled amid the nightmare they've been forced to endure.

Another sign comes when Maass's Dante-esque journey takes him to a "detention center" run by the commandos:

We walked through the entrance gates of the center and stood, briefly, outside the main hall. Looking through the doors, I saw about 100 detainees squatting on the floor, hands bound behind their backs; most were blindfolded. To my right, outside the doors, a leather-jacketed security official was slapping and kicking a detainee who was sitting on the ground. We went to a room adjacent to the main hall, and as we walked in, a detainee was led out with fresh blood around his nose. The room had enough space for a couple of desks and chairs; one desk had bloodstains running down its side. . . .

A few minutes after the interview started, a man began screaming in the main hall, drowning out the Saudi's voice. ''Allah!'' he shouted. ''Allah! Allah!'' It was not an ecstatic cry; it was chilling, like the screams of a madman, or of someone being driven mad. ''Allah!'' he yelled again and again. The shouts were too loud to ignore. Steele left the room to find out what was happening. When returned, the shouts had ceased. But soon, through the window behind me, I could hear the sounds of someone vomiting, coming from an area where other detainees were being held, at the side of the building.

. . . One afternoon as I was standing near City Hall, I heard a gunshot from within or behind the detention center. In previous days, I saw or heard, on several occasions, accidental shots by commandos -- their weapons discipline was far from perfect -- so I assumed it was another negligent discharge. But within a minute or so, there was another shot from the same place -- inside or behind the detention center.
There are caveats throughout the article that, of course, the U.S. isn't really condoning any of this brutality, much less pursuing it as an intentional policy. And yet, all of the above incidents occurred in the presence of American military officers and a U.S. civilian journalist. As Maass notes more than once, the worst atrocities tend to occur out of sight ... and even the Americans who assure Maass that they're doing what they can to restrain the death squad commandos acknowledge that the latter are entirely capable of committing such crimes.

Not only that, these are exactly the goons that Donald Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad to personally argue for keeping in the Iraqi military. So, please, spare me the Pollyanna bullshit disingenuous reasoning that we're trying to bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East, with Iraq as a shining example. It never was true, and as our lengthy fight against elections and our current sponsorship of the Special Police Commandos shows, the Bushites would be perfectly happy with a Saddam-free version of Saddamism.

***

The New York Times
Sunnis Accuse Iraqi Military of Kidnappings and Slayings
By DEXTER FILKINS
Published: November 29, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/29/international/middleeast/29security.html

R.Dreyfuss: Our Monsters in Iraq

2005-11-28T11:11:00.000-08:00

Thanks to CL for passing this along. --RB

Our Monsters In Iraq
Robert Dreyfuss
November 18, 2005

Robert Dreyfuss is the author of Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books, 2005). Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.He can be reached at his website: www.robertdreyfuss.com.

It is time to start waving the bloody shirt. There is no longer any doubt that the men that the United States has installed in power in Iraq are monsters. Not only that, but they are monsters armed, trained and supported by George W. Bush's administration. The very same Bush administration that defends torture of captives in the so-called War on Terrorism is using 150,000 U.S. troops to support a regime in Baghdad for which torture, assassination and other war crimes are routine.

So far, it appears that the facts are these: that Iraq's interior ministry, whose top officials, strike forces and police commando units (including the so-called Wolf Brigade) are controlled by paramilitary units from Shiite militias, maintained a medieval torture chamber; that inside that facility, hundreds of mostly Sunni Arab men were bestialized, with electric drills skewering their bones, with their skins flayed off, and more; that roving units of death-squad commandos are killing countless other Sunni Arab men in order to terrorize the Iraqi opposition. Even the Washington Post, that last-ditch defender of America's illegal and unprovoked assault on Iraq, says:

Scandal over the secret prison has forced the seven-month-old Shiite-led government to confront growing charges of mass illegal detentions, torture and killings of Sunni men. Members of the Sunni minority, locked in a struggle with the Shiite majority over the division of power in Iraq, say men dressed in Interior Ministry uniforms have repeatedly rounded up Sunni men from neighborhoods and towns. Bodies of scores of them have been found dumped by roadsides or in gullies.

The New York Times reports that the Iraqi interior minister isn't all that upset about the torture center. Bayan Jabr, "speaking of the prison in an angry sarcastic tone, said, 'There has been much exaggeration about this issue.' And he added, "Nobody was beheaded.'" So, apparently not beheading innocents is the standard of justice in the New Iraq. And, apparently there may be dozens, scores or hundreds of similar facilities.

This is not a surprise.

Nearly two years ago, writing in the American Prospect, I wrote the following: "The Prospect has learned that part of a secret $3 billion in new funds—tucked away in the $87 billion Iraq appropriation that Congress approved in early November—will go toward the creation of a paramilitary unit manned by militiamen associated with former Iraqi exile groups...The bulk of the covert money will support U.S. efforts to create a lethal, and revenge-minded, Iraqi security force." Except for a parallel story by Sy Hersh in the New Yorker, the story was ignored.

Over the past two years, writing for TomPaine.com, I have repeatedly written about Shiite death squads and about abuses by the paramilitary Badr Brigade, the secret army trained and run by Iran's Revolutionary Guards. Iraqi Sunnis and opposition leaders, including Aiham Al Sammarae (as I wrote for TomPaine ) have charged that the Iraqi government has been running assassination teams. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, have been killed already, including two attorneys for those accused in the kangaroo court set up to convict Saddam Hussein and other former Iraqi government officials. The Post suggests that the prison uncovered in Baghdad was a "secret torture center run with the help of intelligence agents from neighboring Iran." Read that again: intelligence agents from Iran.

Last week I had a chilling encounter with one of the monsters responsible for the Murder Inc. units run by Badr and by the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI). At a Washington think tank, I met Adel Abdul Mahdi, Iraq's so-called deputy president and a SCIRI official. When I asked Mahdi about reports that Iraqi police and interior ministry squads were carrying out assassinations and other illegal acts, he didn't deny it—but, he said, such acts were merely a reaction to the terrorism of the resistance. "There is terrorism on only one side," he said. "Inappropriate acts by the other side, by the police—this is something else. This is a reaction." As far as civilian casualties in Sunni towns, he had this to say: "You can't fight terrorism without attacking some popular areas."

I also asked him about the Badr Brigade, the Iranian-backed paramilitary force that is the main domestic army propping up Abdul Mahdi's Shiite coalition, he said "they are disarmed," which is patently absurd. He added: "They participate fully in the political process."

Abdul Mahdi had this to say about Fallujah, the city that was obliterated by the U.S. armed forces a year ago. "It is one of the most peaceful areas in Iraq. I don't know whether the people are happy or not. But it is one of the most peaceful cities."

Make no mistake. The gangsters now running Iraq are our creatures.

Earlier this week, I was speaking with someone who was involved in the pre-2003 war planning effort vis-à-vis Iraq. As I mentioned in TPM Cafe , he told me that some of his colleagues realized that the New Iraq would probably be taken over not by Ahmed Chalabi, but by the Shiite fundamentalists. Those radical-right parties (along with the Kurds) were the real forces that took part in Chalabi's INC bloc. And the United States consciously supported the toppling of Saddam knowing that radical Shiites would be the chief beneficiaries. This was not an intelligence failure. We knew it. This was an explicit decision by the neocon-dominated cabal to replace Saddam with Shiite crazies. Now, we see that those crazies are running Saddam-like torture prisons where they use electric drills and flay the skin off Sunni captives.

The military in Iraq is scrambling to limit the damage from the stunning revelation about the men who are running Iraq today. We toppled Saddam—and in his place we've installed a hundred mini-Saddams.

***

Truthout.org
Iraqi Guards Seen as Death Squads
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/111705M.shtml
Among the varied armed security men on Baghdad's streets these days, you can't miss the police commandos... The commandos are part of the Iraqi security forces that the Bush administration says will gradually replace American troops in this war. But the commandos are being blamed for a wave of kidnappings and executions around Baghdad since the spring.

***

See also, Kim Sengupta, The Dirty War: Torture and mutilation used on Iraqi "insurgents", The Independent (UK) Nov 20, 2005

J.Scahill: Cheney's fear mongering on germs: another potential disaster

2005-11-28T11:09:00.000-08:00

Click here to return to the browser-optimized version of this page.

This article can be found on the web at
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051128/scahill

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Germ Boys and Yes Men
by JEREMY SCAHILL

[from the November 28, 2005 issue]

In early November George W. Bush, struggling to claw his way upward in polls that had acquired the consistency of quicksand after two months of blunders and disasters, launched a new PR blitz. The Administration declared it was taking charge of the nation's health and security with an all-out war on the flu (to be conducted with vaccines provided by well-connected pharmaceutical companies). "Our country has been given fair warning of this danger to our homeland," Bush declared. "It's my responsibility as President to take measures now to protect the American people."

But if Bush hoped to wipe away the stain of Katrina--and the memory of a hapless Michael Brown steering FEMA in circles while New Orleans drowned--he should have thought twice about bringing up the specter of a public health emergency, because the man responsible for coordinating the federal response to a flu pandemic or bioterror attack could well be the next Michael Brown.

Meet Stewart Simonson. He's the official charged by Bush with "the protection of the civilian population from acts of bioterrorism and other public health emergencies"--a well-connected, ideological, ambitious Republican with zero public health management or medical expertise, whose previous job was as a corporate lawyer for Amtrak. When Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, recently speculated, "If something comes along that is truly serious...like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence," many of those professionally concerned with such scenarios couldn't help thinking of Simonson. They recalled his own unsettling words at a recent Homeland Security subcommittee hearing on government response to a chemical or biological attack: "We're learning as we go."

"Great. What we need in the middle of a crisis is somebody learning on the job at that high level of government," says Jerry Hauer, Simonson's immediate predecessor at the Office of Public Health Emergency Preparedness (OPHEP) and a veteran public health expert who served as Rudy Giuliani's director of emergency management from 1996 to 2000.

"If I was in charge, he wouldn't be in that position," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. "We don't have the best and brightest in the key positions, and this leaves us in a very, very precarious situation."

So how is it that Simonson ended up in a position that could impact the lives and health of millions? Simonson's qualifications can be summed up in two words: Tommy Thompson. Simonson was a protégé of the former Health and Human Services secretary and longtime Republican governor of Wisconsin. Thompson hired him out of the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1995 and put him on the political fast track, eventually naming him as his legal counsel. Thompson then used his influence as chair of Amtrak's board to place Simonson as the rail service's corporate counsel. When Bush named Thompson as HHS secretary, Simonson again went with him, and he has been rising through the ranks of the Administration and the Republican Party ever since. "He's a political hack, a sycophant," says Ed Garvey, a prominent Wisconsin attorney and the state's former deputy attorney general. "People just laughed when he was appointed to Amtrak, but when the word came out that he was in charge of bioterrorism, it turned to alarm. When you realize that people's lives are at stake, it's frightening. It's just one of those moments when you say, Oh, my God."

What is particularly disturbing to public health professionals and others is that Simonson is in charge of insuring that the country has adequate vaccines and antivirals to combat an avian flu outbreak. "Mr. Simonson is a lawyer, not a medical expert," declared Representative Henry Waxman, who highlighted Simonson in a list of five "inexperienced individuals with political connections." The California Democrat warned that the appointment of people like Simonson has "led to legitimate public concern that those in government, particularly those who are relied upon to keep us safe from harm, are not competent or independent in their judgments." As evidence of this, Waxman cited Simonson's July appearance before the House Government Reform Committee, where Simonson "claimed he had sufficient funds to purchase influenza vaccine and antiviral medication for the nation. The next day his office submitted a funding request to Congress seeking an additional $150 million for flu vaccine and antiviral medication."

But it is Simonson's acquiescence in the Bush Administration's reordering of priorities in the name of the "war on terror" that has most distinguished him throughout his career at HHS. Shortly after 9/11 Thompson and Simonson began plans to create an office within HHS dedicated to combating terrorism, which became OPHEP. "When Stewart came into this, he was deputy counsel to the secretary and a very close friend of the secretary's," says Donald "DA" Henderson, named by Thompson as the founding director of OPHEP, who was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bush. "Within a short period of time, this became all [Simonson] was doing--without a title."

In mid-2002, as the White House aggressively sought to convince the world that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, it was engaged on another front of the propaganda war at home: convincing Americans that Saddam was poised to deploy biological weapons in an attack on American soil. It was a battle that would pit Vice President Cheney and his now-indicted chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby against a team of public health experts at HHS, led by then-OPHEP chief Jerry Hauer. Inside HHS it was Simonson who emerged as the White House's key strategic ally.

From his days as Defense Secretary during the Gulf War, Cheney was intensely interested in biological warfare. Libby, who worked for Cheney as an under secretary from 1990 to '92, shares his boss's obsession with biowar. Known in the Administration as "germ boy," Libby was obsessed with pre-emptively vaccinating the entire population against smallpox. (The fixation even extended to Libby's 1996 novel, The Apprentice, about a smallpox epidemic.) Shortly after 9/11 Cheney and Libby were briefed on a war game called Dark Winter, which simulated a smallpox attack on the United States. Interestingly, New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who penned a book called Germs, had taken part in the exercise, playing a reporter covering the attack. "It's a dramatic briefing," Libby told the Washington Post, "but we were well on this road already." Libby said that Cheney advocated "a forward-leaning position on protecting Americans from this threat."

Many in the public health community regarded Cheney and Libby's calls for mass smallpox vaccinations as fearmongering. Hauer, who also took part in Dark Winter, was among those asking uncomfortably probing questions. Hauer butted heads directly with Libby and his deputy on homeland security, Carole Kuntz. Another veteran of the first Bush Administration, Kuntz was Libby's special assistant at the Pentagon when Cheney was Defense Secretary. "The risks of vaccinating the whole country were greater than what we saw as the threat," says Hauer. "You're so focused on smallpox you lose perspective on all the other planning you're trying to do and nobody could make a good medical or public health case." Hauer, who ultimately would have been in charge of implementing Libby's program, says he had no choice but to oppose the plan. "There were times I felt you had to not be a yes man. You do an enormous disservice when you do that." Hauer says that when he raised objections to mass smallpox vaccinations, Kuntz became "downright offensive." Hauer adds, "It was very clear that I was not giving her the answers she wanted or telling her what she wanted to hear."

Like so many other instances when expert knowledge was discarded in the run-up to war, the bioterror obsession could well have long-term consequences. "It has been four years of throwing money at a perceived threat with very little to show for it," says Columbia's Dr. Redlener. Many public health experts say that the billions spent preparing for these imagined threats have left the country dangerously unprepared for actual ones, including the very real possibility of an avian flu outbreak, which is only now being addressed.

Cheney's office was eventually forced to back off its call for universal vaccinations, but the Administration persisted in hyping the threat of a bioterror attack. In early 2003 Bush announced a major biodefense initiative during his now infamous State of the Union address, laced with references to Iraq's alleged WMDs, including the fraudulent evidence about Iraq attempting to import uranium from Niger. Bush spoke of the prospect of terror attacks with anthrax, botulinum toxin, Ebola and plague. "We must assume that our enemies would use these diseases as weapons," he told the nation. The $6 billion plan was called Project Bioshield. Bush named Cheney as his point man on the project; at HHS it was Stewart Simonson.

Bioshield quickly became the main focus of OPHEP's work. For eighteen months, according to current and former HHS officials, Simonson worked diligently with Cheney's office to win Congressional approval for the program. Cheney scared up support for the plan, personally telling lawmakers Bioshield was "life on the planet stuff." Henderson says that Simonson's close contacts at the White House were "very helpful working with the Bioshield legislation."

At the time, Hauer was still heading OPHEP, while Simonson was Thompson's deputy legal counsel. According to former and current HHS officials, a power struggle developed between Hauer--who had already angered the Vice President's office with his opposition to the smallpox plan--and the well-connected Simonson. Hauer was critical of the way Bioshield was being thrown together and disagreed with Simonson on the priorities emerging within HHS, which increasingly privileged "war on terror"-related programs over preparing city and state governments and agencies for disasters, as well as over plans vital to public health, like preparing for a flu epidemic.

"Bioshield was a disaster," says Hauer. "It was done half-assed.... Instead of doing it right, they rushed to get it done so that they could announce it in the State of the Union." Hauer alleges that while Bioshield was being developed, the White House political office, led by Karl Rove, was seeking to undermine his authority. A couple of years before, Hauer, a Democrat, had aroused the ire of his former boss, Rudy Giuliani, after he publicly endorsed Mark Green over Michael Bloomberg in the 2001 New York City mayoral race. When he subsequently went to Washington to work for HHS, his title remained "acting" assistant secretary because the White House refused to officially approve his appointment. "The White House was not going to confirm me, particularly after the folks in New York were calling saying I supported a Democrat. I'm a Democrat. It was as simple as that." Still, he says, Thompson backed him and retained him at HHS despite the political pressure.

By March 2003, however, Hauer had been stripped of much of his authority, and he knew his days were numbered. Simonson intervened to prevent Hauer from attending a briefing in Thompson's office on Bioshield. In a March 24 e-mail to Thompson's briefing coordinator Simonson wrote, "Bioshield does not involve Jerry so I am unclear as to why he invited [sic]."

With the 2004 election a year away, and the environment at the agency becoming more hostile, Hauer says he could not in good faith continue to work for the Administration. "The political side of this White House is very vindictive," says Hauer. He says it was made clear to him that if he was not willing to endorse the President and "attend events," it was time to move on. "I don't want to be disrespectful of the office of the presidency," Hauer says. "I just felt that things needed a change, so I could not be part of the Administration and not support the White House. Plus, the fact is there was enormous frustration at HHS in large part because of Stewart."

In April 2004, with Hauer out of the way, Bush named Simonson director of OPHEP. Hauer says that with Simonson the Administration has "somebody they know will go along with pretty much anything they want." On July 21, a day before the 9/11 commission issued its findings, Bush signed Bioshield into law. The White House released a statement saying, "Today's action is just the latest step the President has taken to win the War on Terror and protect our homeland."

Even within the "war on terror" community, Bioshield has proved controversial. That's because more than 80 percent of the nearly $1 billion allocated under the program has gone to a scandal-plagued company that has never successfully produced an FDA-licensed vaccine. In November 2004 California-based VaxGen was handed one of the largest government vaccine contracts in history. The company is largely known for its failed AIDS vaccine, and just a few months before VaxGen won the Bioshield contract, the Nasdaq took the unusual step of delisting it from trading because of financial irregularities. So why did it get the contract? "I have no idea why VaxGen was selected," admits Henderson, who remains chair of the influential Secretary's Advisory Council at HHS. "It's not for me to decide whether it's a good idea or not." But it was for Simonson and his staff. And as with many Bush Administration contracts, several signs point to cronyism as the deciding factor--among them: VaxGen CEO Lance Gordon is a longtime associate of one of Simonson's top deputies on Bioshield, Dr. Phil Russell, former chief of Army medical research.

Now a powerful group of Republican lawmakers is pushing "Bioshield 2" through Congress. The legislation would strip people injured by vaccines of their right to sue manufacturers and would virtually eliminate pharmaceutical corporate accountability. The legislation would also make the newly created Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency the only federal agency exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

Simonson did not return numerous messages left for him at his office. But Thompson stands by him, as does Henderson. "This is not necessarily somebody who has got a lot of depth of background here, but you can get people who have a variety of expertise. I would liken it to having a CEO in a company," says Henderson, adding that Simonson "may not have been qualified but he is a real learner.... We are where we are today because Stewart pressed this very hard. He read a lot, he talked a lot, he learned a lot."

Perhaps not quite enough, because where we are today, according to many public health experts, is unprepared.

S.Blumenthal on Cheney's illegitmate power +NYT editorial : The dark force

2005-11-28T10:11:00.000-08:00

A very important and lonely article by former Clintonite, Sid Blumenthal, about Cheney as the prime mover and monster of the US government.

It's distressing that for all the damage that Cheney has done and continues to do, so few of these articles have been written. In an amazing (or not so amazing) editorial, the NYT spoke of Cheney as the "dark force" in this administration and suggested that Bush should marginalize him! (see NYT editorial below) --RB

Here are some key paragraphs from the Blumenthal article, as chosen by blogger, Laura Rozen (11.25.05)

The hallmark of the Dick Cheney administration is its illegitimacy. Its essential method is bypassing established lines of authority; its goal is the concentration of unaccountable presidential power. When it matters, the regular operations of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department have been sidelined.

Richard Nixon is the model, but with modifications. In the Nixon administration, the president was the prime mover, present at the creation of his own options, attentive to detail, and conscious of their consequences. In the Cheney administration, the president is volatile but passive, firm but malleable, presiding but absent. Once his complicity has been arranged, a closely held "cabal" -- as Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, calls it -- wields control.

Within the White House, the office of the vice president is the strategic center. The National Security Council has been demoted to enabler and implementer. Systems of off-line operations have been laid to evade professional analysis and a responsible chain of command. Those who attempt to fulfill their duties in the old ways have been humiliated when necessary, fired, retired early or shunted aside. In their place, acolytes and careerists indistinguishable from true believers in their eagerness have been elevated. ...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/blumenthal/2005/11/24/cheney/print.html

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The long march of Dick Cheney
For his entire career, he sought untrammeled power. The Bush presidency and 9/11 finally gave it to him -- and he's not about to give it up.
By Sidney Blumenthal

Nov. 24, 2005 | The hallmark of the Dick Cheney administration is its illegitimacy. Its essential method is bypassing established lines of authority; its goal is the concentration of unaccountable presidential power. When it matters, the regular operations of the CIA, Defense Department and State Department have been sidelined.

Richard Nixon is the model, but with modifications. In the Nixon administration, the president was the prime mover, present at the creation of his own options, attentive to detail, and conscious of their consequences. In the Cheney administration, the president is volatile but passive, firm but malleable, presiding but absent. Once his complicity has been arranged, a closely held "cabal" -- as Lawrence Wilkerson, once chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, calls it -- wields control.

Within the White House, the office of the vice president is the strategic center. The National Security Council has been demoted to enabler and implementer. Systems of off-line operations have been laid to evade professional analysis and a responsible chain of command. Those who attempt to fulfill their duties in the old ways have been humiliated when necessary, fired, retired early or shunted aside. In their place, acolytes and careerists indistinguishable from true believers in their eagerness have been elevated.

The collapse of sections of the façade shielding Cheney from public view has not inhibited him. His former chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice, appears to be withholding information about the vice president's actions in the Plame affair from the special prosecutor. While Bush has declaimed, "We do not torture," Cheney lobbied the Senate to stop it from prohibiting torture.

At the same time, Cheney has taken the lead in defending the administration from charges that it twisted intelligence to justify the Iraq war and misled the Congress even as new stories underscore the legitimacy of the charges.

Former Sen. Bob Graham has revealed, in a Nov. 20 article in the Washington Post, that the condensed version of the National Intelligence Estimate titled "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs" that was submitted to the Senate days before it voted on the Iraq war resolution "represented an unqualified case that Hussein possessed [WMD], avoided a discussion of whether he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in the classified version." The condensed version also contained the falsehood that Saddam Hussein was seeking "weapons-grade fissile material from abroad."

The administration relied for key information in the NIE on an Iraqi defector code-named Curveball. According to a Nov. 20 report in the Los Angeles Times, it had learned from German intelligence beforehand that Curveball was completely untrustworthy and his claims fabricated. Yet Bush, Cheney and, most notably, Powell in his prewar performance before the United Nations, which he now calls the biggest "blot" on his record and about which he insists he was "deceived," touted Curveball's disinformation.

In two speeches over the past week Cheney has called congressional critics "dishonest," "shameless" and "reprehensible." He ridiculed their claim that they did not have the same intelligence as the administration. "These are elected officials who had access to the intelligence materials. They are known to have a high opinion of their own analytical capabilities." Lambasting them for historical "revisionism," he repeatedly invoked Sept. 11. "We were not in Iraq on September 11th, 2001 -- and the terrorists hit us anyway," he said.

The day after Cheney's most recent speech, the National Journal reported that the president's daily briefing prepared by the CIA 10 days after Sept. 11, 2001, indicated that there was no connection between Saddam and the terrorist attacks. Of course, the 9/11 Commission had made the same point in its report.

Even though experts and pundits contradict his talking points, Cheney presents them with characteristic assurance. His rhetoric is like a paving truck that will flatten obstacles. Cheney remains undeterred; he has no recourse. He will not run for president in 2008. He is defending more than the Bush record; he is defending the culmination of his career. Cheney's alliances, ideas, antagonisms and tactics have accumulated for decades.

Cheney is a master bureaucrat, proficient in the White House, the agencies and departments, and Congress. The many offices Cheney has held add up to an extraordinary résumé. His competence and measured manner are often mistaken for moderation. Among those who have misjudged Cheney are military men -- Colin Powell, Brent Scowcroft and Wilkerson, who lacked a sense of him as a political man in full. As a result, they expressed surprise at their discovery of the ideological hard man. Scowcroft told the New Yorker recently that Cheney was not the Cheney he once knew. But Scowcroft and the other military men rose by working through regular channels; they were trained to respect established authority. They are at a disadvantage in internal political battles with those operating by different rules of warfare. Their realism does not account for radicalism within the U.S. government.

Nixon's resignation in the Watergate scandal thwarted his designs for an unchecked imperial presidency. It was in that White House that Cheney gained his formative experience as the assistant to Nixon's counselor, Donald Rumsfeld. When Gerald Ford acceded to the presidency, he summoned Rumsfeld from his posting as NATO ambassador to become his chief of staff. Rumsfeld, in turn, brought back his former deputy, Cheney.

From Nixon, they learned the application of ruthlessness and the harsh lesson of failure. Under Ford, Rumsfeld designated Cheney as his surrogate on intelligence matters. During the immediate aftermath of Watergate, Congress investigated past CIA abuses, and the press was filled with revelations. In May 1975, Seymour Hersh reported in the New York Times on how the CIA had sought to recover a sunken Soviet submarine with a deep-sea mining vessel called the Glomar Explorer, built by Howard Hughes. When Hersh's article appeared, Cheney wrote memos laying out options ranging from indicting Hersh or getting a search warrant for Hersh's apartment to suing the Times and pressuring its owners "to discourage the NYT and other publications from similar action." "In the end," writes James Mann, in his indispensable book, "Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet," "Cheney and the White House decided to back off after the intelligence community decided its work had not been significantly damaged."

Rumsfeld and Cheney quickly gained control of the White House staff, edging out Ford's old aides. From this base, they waged bureaucratic war on Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger, a colossus of foreign policy, who occupied the posts of both secretary of state and national security advisor. Rumsfeld and Cheney were the right wing of the Ford administration, opposed to the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, and they operated by stealthy internal maneuver. The Secret Service gave Cheney the code name "Backseat."

In 1975, Rumsfeld and Cheney stage-managed a Cabinet purge called the "Halloween massacre" that made Rumsfeld secretary of defense and Cheney White House chief of staff. Kissinger, forced to surrender control of the National Security Council, angrily drafted a letter of resignation (which he never submitted). Rumsfeld and Cheney helped convince Ford, who faced a challenge for the Republican nomination from Ronald Reagan, that he needed to shore up his support on the right and that Rockefeller was a political liability. Rockefeller felt compelled to announce he would not be Ford's running mate. Upset at the end of his ambition, Rockefeller charged that Rumsfeld intended to become vice president himself. In fact, Rumsfeld had contemplated running for president in the future and undoubtedly would have accepted a vice presidential nod.

In the meantime, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld undermined the negotiations for a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty being conducted by Kissinger. Fighting off Reagan's attacks during the Republican primaries, Ford was pressured by Cheney to adopt his foreign policy views, which amounted to a self-repudiation. At the Republican Party Convention, acting as Ford's representative, Cheney engineered the adoption of Reagan's foreign policy plank in the platform. By doing so he preempted an open debate and split. Privately, Ford, Kissinger and Rockefeller were infuriated.

As part of the Halloween massacre Rumsfeld and Cheney pushed out CIA director William Colby and replaced him with George H.W. Bush, then the U.S. plenipotentiary to China. The CIA had been uncooperative with the Rumsfeld/Cheney anti-détente campaign. Instead of producing intelligence reports simply showing an urgent Soviet military buildup, the CIA issued complex analyses that were filled with qualifications. Its National Intelligence Estimate on the Soviet threat contained numerous caveats, dissents and contradictory opinions. From the conservative point of view, the CIA was guilty of groupthink, unwilling to challenge its own premises and hostile to conservative ideas.

The new CIA director was prompted to authorize an alternative unit outside the CIA to challenge the agency's intelligence on Soviet intentions. Bush was more compliant in the political winds than his predecessor. Consisting of a host of conservatives, the unit was called Team B. A young aide from the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Paul Wolfowitz, was selected to represent Rumsfeld's interest and served as coauthor of Team B's report. The report was single-minded in its conclusion about the Soviet buildup and cleansed of contrary intelligence. It was fundamentally a political tool in the struggle for control of the Republican Party, intended to destroy détente and aimed particularly at Kissinger. Both Ford and Kissinger took pains to dismiss Team B and its effort. (Later, Team B's report was revealed to be wildly off the mark about the scope and capability of the Soviet military.)

With Ford's defeat, Team B became the kernel of the Committee on the Present Danger, a conservative group that attacked President Carter for weakness on the Soviet threat. The growing strength of the right thwarted ratification of SALT II, setting the stage for Reagan's nomination and election.

Elected to the House of Representatives in 1978, Cheney became the Republican leader on the House Intelligence Committee, where he consistently fought congressional oversight and limits on presidential authority. When Congress investigated the Iran-Contra scandal (the creation of an illegal, privately funded, offshore U.S. foreign policy initiative), Cheney was the crucial administration defender. At every turn, he blocked the Democrats and prevented them from questioning Vice President Bush. Under his leadership, not a single House Republican signed the special investigating committee's final report charging "secrecy, deception and disdain for law." Instead, the Republicans issued their own report claiming there had been no major wrongdoing.

The origin of Cheney's alliance with the neoconservatives goes back to his instrumental support for Team B. Upon being appointed secretary of defense by the elder Bush, he kept on Wolfowitz as undersecretary. And Wolfowitz kept on his deputy, his former student at the University of Chicago, Scooter Libby. Earlier, Wolfowitz and Libby had written a document expressing suspicion of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's liberalizing perestroika and warning against making deals with him, a document that President Reagan ignored as he made an arms control agreement and proclaimed that the Cold War was ending.

During the Gulf War, Secretary of Defense Cheney clashed with Gen. Colin Powell. At one point, he admonished Powell, who had been Reagan's national security advisor, "Colin, you're chairman of the Joint Chiefs ... so stick to military matters." During the run-up to the war, Cheney set up a secret unit in the Pentagon to develop an alternative war plan, his own version of Team B. "Set up a team, and don't tell Powell or anybody else," Cheney ordered Wolfowitz. The plan was called Operation Scorpion. "While Powell was out of town, visiting Saudi Arabia, Cheney -- again, without telling Powell -- took the civilian-drafted plan, Operation Scorpion, to the White House and presented it to the president and the national security adviser," writes Mann in his book. Bush, however, rejected it as too risky. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf was enraged at Cheney's presumption. "Put a civilian in charge of professional military men and before long he's no longer satisfied with setting policy but wants to outgeneral the generals," he wrote in his memoir. After Operation Scorpion was rejected, Cheney urged Bush to go to war without congressional approval, a notion the elder Bush dismissed.

After the Gulf War victory, in 1992, Cheney approved a new "Defense Planning Guidance" advocating U.S. unilateralism in the post-Cold War, a document whose final draft was written by Libby. Cheney assumed Republican rule for the indefinite future.

One week after Bill Clinton's inauguration, on Jan. 27, 1993, Cheney appeared on "Larry King Live," where he declared his interest in running for the presidency. "Obviously," he said, "it's something I'll take a look at ... Obviously, I've worked for three presidents and watched two others up close, and so it is an idea that has occurred to me." For two years, he quietly campaigned in Republican circles, but discovered little enthusiasm. He was less well known than he imagined and less magnetic in person than his former titles suggested. On Aug. 10, 1995, he held a news conference at the headquarters of the Halliburton Co. in Dallas, announcing he would become its chief executive officer. "When I made the decision earlier this year not to run for president, not to seek the White House, that really was a decision to wrap up my political career and move on to other things," he said.

But in 2000, Cheney surfaced in the role of party elder, above the fray, willing to serve as the man who would help Gov. George W. Bush determine who should be his running mate. Prospective candidates turned over to him all sensitive material about themselves, financial, political and personal. Once he had collected it, he decided that he should be the vice presidential candidate himself. Bush said he had previously thought of the idea and happily accepted. Asked who vetted Cheney's records, Bush's then aide Karen Hughes explained, "Just as with other candidates, Secretary Cheney is the one who handled that."

Most observers assumed that Cheney would provide balancing experience and maturity, serving in his way as a surrogate father and elder statesman. Few grasped his deeply held view on presidential power. With Rumsfeld returned as secretary of defense, the position he had held during the Ford administration, the old team was back in place. Rivals from the past had departed and the field was clear. The methods used before were implemented again. To get around the CIA, the Office of Special Plans was created within the Pentagon, yet another version of Team B. Senior military dissenters were removed. Powell was manipulated and outmaneuvered.

The making of the Iraq war, torture policy and an industry-friendly energy plan has required secrecy, deception and subordination of government as it previously existed. But these, too, are means to an end. Even projecting a "war on terror" as total war, trying to envelop the whole American society within its fog, is a device to invest absolute power in the executive.

Dick Cheney sees in George W. Bush his last chance. Nixon self-destructed, Ford was fatally compromised by his moderation, Reagan was not what was hoped for, the elder Bush ended up a disappointment. In every case, the Republican presidents had been checked or gone soft. Finally, President Bush provided the instrument, Sept. 11 the opportunity. This time the failures of the past provided the guideposts for getting it right. The administration's heedlessness was simply the wisdom of Cheney's experience.

-- By Sidney Blumenthal

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New York Times Editorial

11.8.05

President Bush's Walkabout

(NYT) 518 words
Published: November 8, 2005

After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long.
In Argentina, Mr. Bush, who prides himself on his ability to relate to world leaders face to face, could barely summon the energy to chat with the 33 other leaders there, almost all of whom would be considered friendly to the United States under normal circumstances. He and his delegation failed to get even a minimally face-saving outcome at the collapsed trade talks and allowed a loudmouthed opportunist like the president of Venezuela to steal the show.

It's amazing to remember that when Mr. Bush first ran for president, he bragged about his understanding of Latin America, his ability to speak Spanish and his friendship with Mexico. But he also made fun of Al Gore for believing that nation-building was a job for the United States military.

The White House is in an uproar over the future of Karl Rove, the president's political adviser, and spinning off rumors that some top cabinet members may be asked to walk the plank. Mr. Bush could certainly afford to replace some of his top advisers. But the central problem is not Karl Rove or Treasury Secretary John Snow or even Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary. It is President Bush himself.

Second terms may be difficult, but the chief executive still has the power to shape what happens. Ronald Reagan managed to turn his messy second term around and deliver -- in great part through his own powers of leadership -- a historic series of agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev that led to the peaceful dismantling of the Soviet empire. Mr. Bush has never demonstrated the capacity for such a comeback. Nevertheless, every American has a stake in hoping that he can surprise us.

The place to begin is with Dick Cheney, the dark force behind many of the administration's most disastrous policies, like the Iraq invasion and the stubborn resistance to energy conservation. Right now, the vice president is devoting himself to beating back Congressional legislation that would prohibit the torture of prisoners. This is truly a remarkable set of priorities: his former chief aide was indicted, Mr. Cheney's back is against the wall, and he's declared war on the Geneva Conventions.

Mr. Bush cannot fire Mr. Cheney, but he could do what other presidents have done to vice presidents: keep him too busy attending funerals and acting as the chairman of studies to do more harm. Mr. Bush would still have to turn his administration around, but it would at least send a signal to the nation and the world that he was in charge, and the next three years might not be as dreadful as they threaten to be right now.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Compan

Alex Cocburn: How the Dems Undercut Murtha

2005-11-28T09:49:00.000-08:00

Friends:
Thanks to Alex for highlighting the Democrats' unwillingness to stand behind Murtha despite the recognition that the great majority of the country agrees with him. Cockburn however, like every other commentator I've seen thus far, is loath to mention, much less explore, the possibility that the Dems' silence is due to the influence of the Zionists on their party because they are still clinging to the war as good for Israel, never mind what it's doing to the US, the world, and the Middle East.

Is there a better explanation for Hillary's and Schumer's silence, the silence of all the NY Congressional delegation including hi profile liberals such as Nadler, Maloney, Rangel and more on Iraq. According to Cockburn, Nancy Pelosi was about to call a press conference rallying behind Murtha, but changed her mind. Who do we think got to her? --Ronald

www.counterpunch.org
Weekend Edition
November 26 / 27, 2005

He Pointed the Way Out; They Chopped Off His Hand
How the Democrats Undercut John Murtha
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Here we have one of the most widely derided presidents in the history of the United States and a war abhorred by a majority of all Americans and the Democrats have near zero traction as a credible party of opposition. The sequence of events after Representative Jack Murtha's speech on Capitol Hill on November 17 tells the story.

It truly was a great speech, as the Marine veteran (37 years in the US Marine Corps, then 31 years in Congress) actually delivered it with extempore additions to the prepared text handed out after his news conference.

Listen to Murtha and you are hearing how the US commanders in Iraq really see the situation. Murtha is trusted by the military and has visited Iraq often. "Many say the Army is broken. Some of our troops are on a third deployment. Recruitment is down even as the military has lowed its standards. They expect to take 20 percent category 4, which is the lowest category, which they said they'd never take. Much of our ground equipment is worn out."

On Iraq's condition: "Oil production and energy production are below prewar level. You remember they said that was going to pay for the war, and it's below prewar level. Our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by the security situation. Only $9 billion of $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. Unemployment is 60 percentClean water is scarce and they only spent $500 million of the $2.2 billion appropriated for water projects.

"And, most importantly -- this is the most important point incidents have increased from 150 a week to over 700 in the last year."

Then, amid his tears, came Murtha's sketches of war's consequences in today's America:

"Now, let me personalize this thing for youI have a young fellow in my district who was blinded and he lost his foot. And they did everything they could for him at Walter Reed, then they sent him home. His father was in jail; he had nobody at home -- imagine this: young kid that age -- 22, 23 years old -- goes home to nobody. V.A. did everything they could do to help him. He was reaching out, so they sent him -- to make sure that he was blind, they sent him to John Hopkins. John Hopkins started to send him bills. Then the collection agency started sending billsImagine, a young person being blinded, without a foot, and he's getting bills from a collection agency."

And finally, Murtha's call for rapid pullout of US troops from Iraq capped by one of the most amazing resumes of political reality ever administered to an audience on Capitol Hill:

"I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis. I believe before the Iraqi elections, scheduled for mid-December, the Iraqi people and the emerging government must be put on notice: The United States will immediately redeploy -- immediately redeploy. All of Iraq must know that Iraq is free, free from a United States occupation. And I believe this will send a signal to the Sunnis to join the political process."

This was no wimp. This was a 73-year old Marine veteran with Purple Hearts and Bronze Star, one of the Armed Forces' most constant supporters. What more credible advocate a speedy end to an unpopular war could the Democrats ever hope for?

Barely had he stopped speaking before the halls of Congress echoed with the squeaks Democrats whimpering with panic as they skipped clear of Murtha's shadow. Emboldening the White House to savage Murtha, John Kerry hurried before the cameras of MSNBC to frag the Pennsylvania congressman and to tell Chris Mathews how he, John Kerry, had a better plan, involving something in the nature of a schedule for withdrawal possibly limping into action in 2006.

Nancy Pelosi, the Democrats' leader in the House abruptly retreated from a scheduled pres conference to express support for Murtha. Scenting weakness, the Republicans put up a resolution calling for withdrawal now. Democratic panic escalated into pell mell retreat, shouting back over their shoulders that they weren't going to fall for such a dirty Republican trick. Why not? What better chance will they get to go on record against the war? In the end just three Democrats (Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, Jose Serrano of New York, and Robert Wexler of Florida voted for immediate withdrawal and six voted "present"). McKinney put it starkly:

"I will not vote to give one more soldier to the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney war machine. A vote on war is the single most important vote we can make in this House. I understand the feelings of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle who might be severely conflicted by the decision we have to make here tonight. But the facts of US occupation of Iraq are also very clear."

They may be clear to McKinney, and Murtha and 60 per cent of the American people, but not to the three Democratic Senators interested in the presidential nomination in 2008. Even after Murtha's lead Russell Feingold continued to mumble about the "target date" for withdrawal being 2006, as does Kerry. For her part Hillary Clinton announced at the start of Thanksgiving week that an immediate U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be "a big mistake" which "would cause more problems for us in America. It will matter to us if Iraq totally collapses into civil war, if it becomes a failed state"

The importance of Murtha's speech was that it vaulted over these laboriously prudent schedules into the reality of what is actually happening in Iraq. As his military sources in Iraq most certainly urged him to point out, the main fuel for the Sunni Arab insurgency is foreign occupation. So long as it continues the resistance is likely to go on. . The idea that the Sunni taking part in the election somehow means a shift from military action is also baloney.

Would there actually be a power vacuum if US withdrew, followed by civil war, as is widely argued in the U.S.? The Sunni can't take Baghdad. They can't penetrate the main Kurdish and Shia areas. How exactly is the US military preventing a civil war at the moment? The refusal of the Shia to retaliate is the most important factor here and this is primarily the result of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani standing firmly against it.

Now suppose Sistani calls for a withdrawal? Then the US and Britain will have little choice but to go, probably over an 18 month period. This very week, incidentally, a gathering in Cairo of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurdish leaders (under the auspices of the Arab League) called for a timetable for US withdrawal and also said that Iraq's opposition had a "legitimate right to resistance." The Sunni are not going to stop fighting while the occupation continues. The quid pro quo for the US leaving would presumably be a ceasefire by the Sunni and an end to suicide bombing attacks.

All those Democratic Party withdrawal dates are predicated on the idea that Iraqi army security forces will be built up and can take over. This scenario is as unrealistic as calls to "internationalize" the occupying force. All the evidence is that only an agreement on the departure of the US will lead to an end to the armed resistance, just as Murtha said. The idea that the Sunni taking part in the election somehow means a shift from military action is also baloney. It is clearly an 'Armalite and ballot box' strategy.

The Evolving Postures of Prof. Juan Cole

First the professor from the University of Michigan, influential in liberal circles as an expert on Iraq, said he wanted withdrawal. Then he said that to urge withdrawal would be advocacy of genocide. Then this, on his website. Can you figure out what he wants?

Cockburn Misrepresents Cole

Alexander Cockburn says in his piece in The Nation: 'Cole says to The Nation Institute's Tom Engelhardt that for the United States to "up and leave" Iraq would be to become an accomplice to genocide. He counsels the heightened use in Iraq of "special forces and air power." In other words, assassinations and saturation bombing.'

Cockburn is referring to my interview with Tom Engelhardt.

I actually haven't called for any assassinations or saturation bombing, and Mr. Cockburn's "In other words" is just a trite way to open up a mendacious smear.

For the thousandth time, what I have in mind is that in the wake of a substantial drawdown of US troops (which I think advisable), a civil war may well break out in Iraq. It is also likely that Sunni Arab militiamen will attempt to kill the members of the current government. (I mean, they are already trying to kill them, they just aren't usually succeeding.)
[snip]