PRESIDENT BUSH'S FOREIGN POLICY DISCUSSION IN THE 2005 STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS - A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT

by Stephen Zunes
Foreign Policy in Focus
February 2005

The foreign policy segments of President George W. Bush's state of the Union address spoke to values and concerns that resonate with the majority of Americans from across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, much of what was said during his speech was quite misleading.

Below are excerpts from the February 2 State of the Union address, followed by a short critical analysis.

"There are still regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction-but no longer without attention and without consequences."

The world has long paid attention to regimes that seek weapons of mass destruction. That is why the international community developed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological and Toxic Weapons, along with their enforcement bodies, such as the International Atomic Energy Agency and Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Indeed, not only does there not seem to have been any more attention or additional threat of consequences to regimes seeking weapons of mass destruction as a result of the Bush administration's actions, but the administration has tried repeatedly to discredit and undermine the authority of these enforcement bodies.

Iraq had eliminated its chemical weapons and its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs over ten years ago and had allowed unfettered inspections by United Nations officials to resume, yet the United States invaded anyway. By contrast, North Korea restarted its nuclear program and has continued to bar inspectors, but it has not been invaded. The message from U.S. policymakers appears to be that the most serious consequences will result if you stop seeking weapons of mass destruction and allow in UN inspectors.

"In Iraq, 28 countries have troops on the ground, the United Nations and the European Union provided technical assistance for the elections, and NATO is leading a mission to help train Iraqi officers."

The vast majority of these "troops" are not combat troops and most of these contingents consist of well under fifty participants. The UN and EU role in the elections, along with the NATO training programs, has been somewhat more tangible, but nevertheless limited and have taken place primarily outside of Iraq. America's "coalition" partners continue to dwindle. Iraq continues to be an overwhelmingly American operation, with only the British providing substantial assistance.

"In the long term, the peace we seek will only be achieved by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder. If whole regions of the world remain in despair and grow in hatred, they will be the recruiting grounds for terror, and that terror will stalk America and other free nations for decades. The only force powerful enough to stop the rise of tyranny and terror, and replace hatred with hope, is the force of human freedom…. And we have declared our own intention: America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world…

"Our aim is to build and preserve a community of free and independent nations, with governments that answer to their citizens, and reflect their own cultures. And because democracies respect their own people and their neighbors, the advance of freedom will lead to peace."

President Bush is certainly correct regarding the correlation between autocratic governance and the rise of extremism. However, the United States has long been the primary backer of repressive governments in the Middle East and, under President Bush, military and security ties with these dictatorships has increased. It is important to note that sixteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, whose family dictatorship has received tens of billions of dollars worth of military hardware and security assistance from the United States since President Bush came to office. The man believed to be the lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Attah, is Egyptian, whose autocratic Mubarak regime receives more than two billion dollars worth of taxpayer-provided military and economic aid annually. None of the hijackers or any prominent al-Qaida leader has come from Iran, Syria, Palestine, Taliban Afghanistan, or Saddam's Iraq, the countries that President Bush most commonly cites as needing greater freedom in order to support American security interests.

If President Bush was serious about promoting freedom, he would call for an immediate cessation of arms transfers and any forms of security assistance to Middle Eastern governments which do not "respect their own people and their neighbors." He has not done so, however.

To cite just one example, there have been few greater allies of freedom than Egypt's Saad El-Din Ibrahim and his Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, and its journal Civil Society. Among the Center's activities was monitoring elections and workshops and civic education. Unfortunately, in 2001, Egyptian authorities arrested Saladin and twenty-seven associates, shut down the Ibn Khaldun Center, and banned their journal. Despite this, U.S. aid has continued to flow to Mubarak's corrupt dictatorship.

Finally, democracies do not necessarily respect their neighbors. Israel is an exemplary democracy (at least for its Jewish citizens), but it has maintained an oftentimes repressive occupation of its Palestinian neighbors since 1967, including widespread and ongoing violations of international humanitarian law.

"The beginnings of reform and democracy in the Palestinian territories are now showing the power of freedom to break old patterns of violence and failure. …Secretary of State Rice…will discuss with [Prime Minster Ariel Sharon and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas] how we and our friends can help the Palestinian people end terror and build the institutions of a peaceful, independent democratic state."

Pro-democracy activists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, including the harshest critics of the corrupt and autocratic rule of the late Yasir Arafat, have long argued that the greatest obstacle to the creation of peaceful, independent and democratic Palestinian state is the Israeli occupation. President Bush has not demanded that Israel end its military occupation, which continues to deny the Palestinians their freedom and which has resulted in the terrorist backlash.

"To promote this democracy, I will ask Congress for $350 million to support Palestinian political, economic, and security reforms. The goal of two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace, is within reach-and America will help them achieve that goal."

First of all, the $350 million figure hardly covers the damage inflicted upon Palestinian society and infrastructure by Israel in recent years, including the U.S.-backed military offensive during the spring of 2002. That figure is also less than one-tenth of what the administration sends annually to the far more prosperous government of Israel, much of which goes to support the occupation and colonization of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which is the major impediment to peace.

While Bush is the first president to so explicitly call for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, there are serious questions as to what kind of "state" he has in mind. He has refused to endorse the Geneva Initiative, the model peace agreement signed in December 2003 by leading Israeli and Palestinian moderates which calls for the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces and colonists from lands seized in 1967 (with minor and reciprocal border adjustments), a shared co-capital in Jerusalem, strict security guarantees for Israel, and no mass return of Palestinian refugees into Israel. Instead, President Bush has endorsed the Sharon Plan, which-while calling for the withdrawal of Israel's illegal settlements from the occupied Gaza Strip-allows Israel to annex the vast majority of its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and surrounding Palestinian lands, leaving the Palestinians with only a series of small non-contiguous cantons surrounded by Israel. Israel would control the air space, water resources, and the movement of people and goods within the archipelago of Palestinian territory as well as between this Palestinian territory and neighboring Egypt and Jordan. In short, the "Palestinian state" that Bush envisions appears to bear a far closer resemblance to the infamous Bantustans of apartheid South Africa than a viable independent country.

"To promote peace and stability in the broader Middle East, we must confront regimes that continue to… pursue weapons of mass murder."

The Bush administration has refused to confront Israel regarding its arsenal of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, even though Israel is required through UN Security Council resolution 487 to place its nuclear program under the trusteeship of the International Atomic Energy Agency. It has refused to confront Pakistan and India in their refusal to disarm as well, despite UN Security Council resolution 1172 requiring these nations to get rid of their nuclear weapons; in fact, the Bush administration dropped sanctions imposed under President Clinton against these two countries. The Bush administration has also failed to confront Egypt, despite its maintaining an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.

The Bush administration's attitude appears to be that it is only willing to confront Middle Eastern countries which "pursue weapons of mass murder" if they are not strategic allies. Indeed, the Bush administration has rejected calls by such diverse countries as Jordan, Syria, Iran, and Egypt for the establishment of a WMD-free zone for the entire Middle East, instead opting for a kind of WMD apartheid where the United States alone has the authority to say which countries can develop these dangerous weapons and which ones cannot. Even putting aside the legal and moral concerns of such double standards, they simply will not work; any attempt to impose a regime of haves and have-nots from the outside will only encourage the have-nots to try even harder to become one of the haves.

"Syria still allows its territory, and parts of Lebanon, to be used by terrorists who seek to destroy every chance of peace in the region. … We expect the Syrian government to end all support for terror and open the door to freedom."

Syria-like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other Arab states-indeed must open its door to freedom, both for its own people as well as for the people of Lebanon, over whose government Syria exercises considerable influence. However, the State Department has acknowledged that Syria has not directly engaged in terrorist operations for more than twenty years.

The Hizbullah movement in Lebanon, which has received limited Syrian support, is now a legal political party with representation in the Lebanese parliament. It appears that its armed wing has not engaged in any acts of international terrorism for more than a decade and it has restricted its attacks against Israeli occupation forces in southern Lebanon and disputed border regions of Syria. Some tiny leftist groups composed of radical Palestinian exiles remain in Syria, but they are largely defunct at this point and are no longer much of a threat. Hamas has a political office in Damascus, as it does in a number of Arab capitals, but its military operations have come almost exclusively from within the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank. In short, Syria is at most a very minor actor in international terrorism and has been an active ally against al-Qaida.

In addition, for well over a decade, the Syrian government has pledged strict security guarantees and even full diplomatic relations with Israel in exchange for Israel returning Syrian land conquered in the 1967 war. A series of UN Security Council resolutions have called on Israel to rescind its annexation of the Golan region, end its ongoing colonization and-in return for security guarantees like those offered by the Damascus government-return the territory to Syria. However, the U.S.-backed Sharon government of Israel has thus far refused to even consider living up to its international obligations. Syria has repeatedly called for a resumption of peace negotiations with Israel, which came tantalizingly close to a final settlement in early 2000 under the more moderate Labor government of Ehud Barak, but the hard-line Sharon has refused the offer.

While much positive can be said about Israel's democratic institutions and traditions and much negative can be said about the autocratic Assad regime in Syria, the fact remains that it is Israel, not Syria, which is primarily responsible for the failure of the peace process between these two nations.

"Today, Iran [is]… pursuing nuclear weapons while depriving its people of the freedom they seek and deserve. We are working with European allies to make clear to the Iranian regime that it must give up its uranium enrichment program and any plutonium reprocessing, and end its support for terror. And to the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for you own liberty, America stands with you."

Just as he did with Iraq, despite his inability to provide credible evidence to support his assertion, President Bush is now insisting that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Though Iran's potential to develop nuclear weapons is far greater than that of Iraq during the final decade of Saddam Hussein's rule and certainly cannot be ruled out, the Islamic Republic's nuclear program-which began with U.S. support under the Shah's regime-appears to be restricted to the development of nuclear energy, which (despite its environmental risks and other concerns) is perfectly legal under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

Unfortunately, the United States has not been working with the Europeans in their thus far successful efforts to prevent Iran from further developing its nuclear program. In fact, the Bush administration has been rather hostile to the efforts of both the Europeans and the International Atomic Energy Agency for its strategy of negotiations, insisting instead on strict sanctions and threatening possible military action.

The past year or so has seen serious setbacks in the gradual political opening Iran had been experiencing over the past decade. However, the Bush administration's concerns for the Iranian people's struggle for liberty should not be taken seriously. It is important to remember that Iran was once free and democratic back in the early 1950s. This bold democratic experiment was cut short, however, when the CIA overthrew the constitutional government of Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and replaced him with the tyrannical Shah who-with active U.S. support of his brutal SAVAK secret police-largely succeeded in subsequent years to wipe out the democratic opposition. Unable to get inside the mosques enough to eliminate the Islamist opposition, when a popular revolt finally ousted him in 1979, the country became dominated by hard-line clerics. The United States has never apologized for its illegal coup against Mossadegh and its quarter century of support for the Shah's repression.

It should also be noted that leading Iranian democrats have defended their country's nuclear program and have argued that support of their efforts by the Bush administration hurts their credibility and opens them up to further repression.

Extremist Islamic groups have coalesced in Iraq today for the same reason they came together in Afghanistan during the 1980s: to support a popular resistance movement in a Muslim society that had been invaded and occupied by a foreign power which sought to impose its system upon them. Most Iraqis, like most Afghans, want to be free from the violence imposed upon them by both terrorists and foreign occupation policies and to determine their own future free from outside influence.

"Our men and women in uniform are fighting terrorists in Iraq, so we do not have to face them here at home."

This is simply a retread of the rationalization so often given during the 1960s and early 1970s as to why U.S. forces could not leave Vietnam: "If we don't fight them over there, we will have to fight them here." Nearly thirty years after the communists completed their takeover of South Vietnam, however, the Vietnamese have yet to attack the United States. In fact, they are becoming increasingly valuable trading partners. Vietnamese stopped killing Americans when American forces got out of their country and stopped killing them. So, presumably, would the Iraqis.

"And the victory of freedom in Iraq will strengthen a new ally in the war on terror, inspire democratic reformers from Damascus to Tehran, bring more hope and progress to a troubled region, and thereby lift a terrible threat from the lives of our children and grandchildren."

It is noteworthy that reformers in Syria and Iran have been quite critical of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, arguing that it has actually provoked the rise of extremist elements in the Middle East and strengthened the repressive regimes in Damascus and Tehran which rationalize for their tightening control due to security concerns along their border with Iraq. Research by leading think tanks-as well as the Pentagon, State Department, and the CIA-indicate that U.S. intervention in Iraq has actually increased the risks from terrorism through heightened anti-American sentiment and has contributed to the instability of the region by strengthening the appeal of these extremist groups.

"We will succeed because the Iraqi people value their own liberty-as they showed the world last Sunday….

"Americans recognize that spirit of liberty, because we share it. In any nation, casting your vote is an act of civic responsibility; for millions of Iraqis, it was also an act of personal courage, and they have earned the respect of us all…

"We will succeed in Iraq because Iraqis are determined to fight for their own freedom, and to write their own history."

Despite the many problems and limitations of the January 30 Iraqi election, it was indeed a remarkable testament of the Iraqi people's desire for self-determination and for accountable government.

However, little credit should be given to President Bush. It should be remembered that the Bush administration, during most of the first year of the U.S. occupation, strongly opposed holding direct elections. Initially, the United States supported the installation of Ahmed Chalabi or some other compliant exile as leader of Iraq. Then, U.S. officials tried to keep their viceroy Paul Bremer in power indefinitely. Next, the Bush administration pushed for a caucus system where appointees of American appointees would choose the new government. It was only after Ayatollah Sistani brought hundreds of thousands of Shiites out onto the streets in January 2004 demanding direct elections that President Bush did give in, but-instead of going ahead with the poll in May as proposed-he postponed it until the following January after the security situation had deteriorated so badly that most of the large and important Sunni Arab minority was unable or unwilling to participate. Furthermore, the insurgency has now reached the point where it appears that the new government will be largely dependent on the ongoing presence of American troops for their survival.

In addition, there are still serious questions as to whether the United States will even allow the Iraqi people to fully exercise their freedom and write their own history. Prior to his departure, Bremer established a series of Transitional Administrative Laws, which included the privatization of much of the country's public assets, unrestricted foreign investment and repatriation of profits, and other controversial economic measures that are almost impossible for the new government to overturn. U.S. citizens in Iraq continue to enjoy extraterritorial rights, meaning they cannot be prosecuted in Iraq for any crime, no matter how serious. U.S. forces can move and attack at will anywhere in the country without the government's assent. Americans have a major presence in virtually every Iraqi government ministry and largely control their budgets. U.S. appointees with terms lasting through 2009 are in charge of "control commissions" which oversee fiscal policy, the media, and other important regulatory areas. U.S. appointees also dominate the judiciary, which has the power to overturn government laws.

http://www.fpif.org/papers/0502critical.html

WHAT I HEARD ABOUT IRAQ

by Eliot Weinberger
London Review of Books
January 11, 2005

Extracts below. For the whole article, see http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n03/wein01_.html

I heard Major Thomas Neemeyer say: 'The only way to stomp out the insurgency of the mind would be to kill the entire population.'

I heard the vice president say: 'Such an enemy cannot be deterred, cannot be contained, cannot be appeased, or negotiated with. It can only be destroyed. And that is the business at hand.'

I heard an Iraqi man say: 'We have at least 700 dead. So many of them are children and women. The stench from the dead bodies in parts of the city is unbearable.'

I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: 'Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.'

I heard that, in the last year alone, the US had fired 127 tons of depleted uranium (DU) munitions in Iraq, the radioactive equivalent of approximately ten thousand Nagasaki bombs. I heard that the widespread use of DU in the first Gulf War was believed to be the primary cause of the health problems suffered by its 580,400 veterans, of whom 467 were wounded during the war itself. Ten years later, 11,000 were dead and 325,000 on medical disability. DU carried in semen led to high rates of endometriosis in their wives and girlfriends, often requiring hysterectomies. Of soldiers who had healthy babies before the war, 67 per cent of their postwar babies were born with severe defects, including missing legs, arms, organs or eyes.

I heard that 15,000 US troops invaded Fallujah while planes dropped 500-pound bombs on 'insurgent targets'. I heard they destroyed the Nazzal Emergency Hospital in the centre of the city, killing 20 doctors. I heard they occupied Fallujah General Hospital, which the military had called a 'centre of propaganda' for reporting civilian casualties. I heard that they confiscated all mobile phones and refused to allow doctors and ambulances to go out and help the wounded.

I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: 'Innocent civilians in that city have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble. There aren't going to be large numbers of civilians killed and certainly not by US forces.'

I heard the Red Cross say that at least 800 civilians had died. I heard Iyad Allawi say there were no civilian casualties in Fallujah.

I heard Kassem Muhammad Ahmed say: 'I watched them roll over wounded people in the streets with tanks.'

I heard a man named Khalil say: 'They shot women and old men in the streets. Then they shot anyone who tried to get their bodies.'

I heard that three-quarters of Fallujah had been shelled into rubble. I heard an American soldier say: 'It's kind of bad we destroyed everything, but at least we gave them a chance for a new start.'

I heard Donald Rumsfeld say: 'I don't believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons.'

I heard Ahmed Chalabi, who had supplied most of the information about the weapons of mass destruction, shrug and say: 'We are heroes in error . . . What was said before is not important.'

I heard Paul Wolfowitz say: 'For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, as justification for invading Iraq, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.'

I heard a reporter ask Donald Rumsfeld: 'If they did not have WMDs, why did they pose an immediate threat to this country?' I heard Rumsfeld answer: 'You and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase "immediate threat". It's become a kind of folklore that that's what happened. If you have any citations, I'd like to see them.' And I heard the reporter read: 'No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people.' Rumsfeld replied: 'It - my view of - of the situation was that he - he had - we - we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that - that we believed and we still do not know - we will know.'

copyright © LRB Ltd, 1997-2004

THE UNWINNABLE WAR

by James Carroll
the Boston Globe
September 7, 2004

GEORGE W. BUSH finally told the truth. It happened last week when he said of the war on terrorism, "I don't think you can win it."

We know it was the truth because of the way it embarrassed him, because of the way his handlers immediately required him to repudiate it ("I probably need to be more articulate"), and because the mass of Republicans were deaf to it. Just as Bush had inadvertently spoken the exact truth about the war on terrorism at its onset ("This crusade, this war on terrorism"), he had inadvertently done so again.

Six months ago, I took a leave from this column. I had been writing obsessively about the war for more than two years, and my truth had become woefully repetitive. "Whatever happens from this week forward in Iraq," I wrote in March, "the main outcome of the war is clear. We have defeated ourselves."

In the time since I wrote that, I confess, even my bleak vision has come to seem like the good old days. After all, that was before Abu Ghraib, before the siege of Najaf, before the Sunnis and Shi'ites discovered that their hatred of the occupiers outweighed their hatred of each other, before the handover of Fallujah to outlaw militants, before Ahmed Chalabi's disgrace (and last week's rehabilitation), before Washington's installation in Baghdad of a blatant puppet regime, before the death toll of young Americans approached 1,000.

Citizens of the United States are a decent, fair-minded people. The only reason we tolerate what is being done in our name in Iraq is that, for us, this war exists only in the realm of metaphor. The words "war on terrorism" fall on our ears much in the way that "war on poverty" or "war on drugs" did.

War is an abstraction in the American imagination. It lives there, cloaked in glory, as an emblem of patriotism. We show our love for our country by sending our troops abroad and then "supporting" them. When images appear that contradict the high-flown rhetoric of war -- whether of young GIs disgracefully humiliating Iraqi prisoners or of a devastated holy city where vast fields of American-created rubble surround a shrine -- we simply do not take them in as real. Thinking of ourselves as only motivated by good intentions, we cannot fathom the possibility that we have demonized an innocent people, that what we are doing is murder on a vast scale.

There is the single most troubling aspect of the war in Iraq. We launched it against the wicked Saddam Hussein, yet the majority of so-called "insurgents" against whom our forces are arrayed hated Hussein more than we did. We are killing people by the thousands who threaten absolutely nothing of ours.

The boys in the Iraqi resistance are not terrorists. They are not Ba'athists. They are not jihadists -- or they weren't until we gave them reason to be. Whatever the justifications for the invasion of Iraq were a year and a half ago, why are we in this war today? And as President Bush might ask, how in the world do we "win" it?

Obviously, something else is going on below the surface of all the stated reasons for this war. The Republican convention last week was gripped with war fever, and the fever itself was the revelation. War is answering an American need that has nothing to do with the Iraqi people.

Even though the war on terrorism is indeed, as the president said, a "crusade," it has nothing real to do with Islam either, although Islam is surely its target. Not Islam as it actually exists in dozens of different settings and cultures across the globe, but an imagined Islam that exists only in the troubled minds of a people who project "evil" outward and then attack it. Alas, it is an old Christian habit.

The war, meanwhile, answers the Bush administration's need to justify an unprecedented repressiveness in the "homeland," and simultaneously prompts widespread docile submission to the new martial law. But more deeply still, by understanding ourselves as a people at war, we Americans find exemption from the duty to face the grotesque shame of what we are doing in the world.

So the final truth about this war is that there is no real enemy (although we are creating enemies by the legion). There will be no victory. I resume this regular column by declaring, President Bush was right.

VICTORY IN THE WAR ON TERROR

by Gwynne Dyer
2 September 2004

"With the right policies, this is a war we can win, this is a war we must win, and this is a war we will win," said Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in Tennessee on 31 August. "The war on terrorism is absolutely winnable," repeated his vice-presidential running mate, Senator John Edwards. That is utter drivel, and they must privately know it, but truth generally loses to calculated lies in politics.

This outburst of bravado was prompted by President George W. Bush's brief brush with the truth about terrorism the previous weekend, when he told an interviewer that he did not really think you can win the war on terror, but that conditions could be changed in ways that would make terrorists less acceptable in certain parts of the world. For a moment there, you glimpsed a functioning intellect at work. Such honesty rarely goes unpunished in politics.

This heroic attempt to grapple with reality was a welcome departure from Mr Bush's usual style -- "I have a clear vision of how to win the war on terror and bring peace to the world," he was claiming as recently as 30 August -- and so his opponents pounced on it at once. "What if President Reagan had said that it may be difficult to win the war against Communism?" asked John Edwards, in one of the least credible displays of indignation in American history.

Mr Bush promptly fled back to the safe terrain of hypocrisy and patriotic lies. "We meet today in a time of war for our country, a war we did not start, yet one that we will win," he told a veterans' conference in Nashville on 1 September. But it is not "a time of war" for the United States, and it cannot "win.".

Some 140,000 young American soldiers are trapped in a neo-colonial war in Iraq (where there were no terrorists until the US invasion), but their casualties are typical of colonial wars: fewer than one percent killed a year. As for the three hundred million Americans at home, exactly as many of them have been killed by terrorists since 9/11 as have been killed by the Creature from the Black Lagoon in the same period. None.

The rhetoric of a "war on terror" have been useful to the Bush administration, and terrorism now bulks inordinately large in any media where the agenda is set by American perspectives. On the front page of the International Herald Tribune that carried the story on Mr Bush's return to political orthodoxy on terrorism, four of the other five stories were also about terrorism: "Twin bus bombs kill 16 in Israel," "Blast leaves 8 dead in Moscow subway," "12 Nepal hostages slain in Iraq," and "French hold hectic talks on captives."

In other words, thirty-six of the quarter-million people who died on this planet on the 31st of August were killed by terrorists: close to one in eight thousand. No wonder the IHT headlined its front page "A Deadly Day of Terror." Although it would have been on firmer statistical ground if it had substituted the headline "A Deadly Day for Swimming" or even "A Deadly Day for Falling Off Ladders."

Actually, more than 36 people were killed by "terrorists" on 31 August -- perhaps as many as fifty or sixty. The rest were just killed in wars that the United States is not all that interested in: in Nepal, in Peru, in Burundi, and in other out-of-the-way countries where the local guerrillas are not Muslims and have no imaginable links with the terrorists who attacked the United States.

Governments that are fighting Muslim rebels, like the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories or the Chechens in Russia, have had more success in tying their local counter-insurgency struggles to the US "war on terror," but that only means that Washington doesn't criticise their human rights violations so much. The only terrorists that the United States government really worries about -- and this would be equally true under a Kerry administration -- are terrorists who attack Americans. There aren't that many of them, and they aren't that dangerous.

George W. Bush spoke the truth, briefly, at the end of August, when he said that the "war on terror" cannot be won. It cannot be won OR lost, because it is only a metaphor, not an actual war. It is like the "war on crime," another metaphor. Nobody ever expected that the "war on crime" would one day end in a surrender ceremony where all the criminals come out with their hands up, and afterwards there is no more crime. It is a STATISTICAL operation, and success is measured by how successful you are in getting the crime RATE down. Same goes for terrorism.

You could do worse than to listen to Stella Rimington, the former director of MI5, Britain's intelligence agency for domestic operations: "I'm afraid that terrorism didn't begin on 9/11 and it will be around for a long time. I was very surprised by the announcement of a war on terrorism because terrorism has been around for thirty-five years...[and it] will be around while there are people with grievances. There are things we can to improve the situation, but there will always be terrorism. One can be misled by talking about a war, as though in some way you can defeat it." As Mr Bush said before his handlers got the muzzle back on.

http://www.gwynnedyer.net/

NOT SCARED YET? TRY CONNECTING THESE DOTS

by Ray McGovern
BuzzFlash
August 9, 2004

"Pre-election period…pre-election plot…pre-election threats:" These rolled off National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's lips no less than seven times yesterday on CNN's Late Edition as she discussed the likely timing of a terrorist attack. She stayed on message.

Dr. Rice said the government had actually "picked up discussion" relating to "trying to do something in the pre-election period," and added that information on the threat came from "active multiple sources."

I found myself wondering if those sources are any better than those cited by Attorney General John Ashcroft on May 26, when he launched this campaign, citing "credible intelligence from multiple sources that al-Qaeda plans an attack on the United States" before the November election. Ashcroft's warning came out of the blue, without the customary involvement of the directors of the C.I.A. and Department of Homeland Security (although the latter quickly fell in line).

In support of his warning, Ashcroft cited "an al-Qaeda spokesman," who the FBI later was embarrassed to admit is "The Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades." Sinister sounding though the name may be, this "group" is thought to consist of no more than one person with a fax machine, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official. That fax is notorious for claiming credit for all manner of death and destruction.

Are the recent warnings and heightened alerts legitimate or contrived? Is this yet another case of "intelligence" being conjured up to serve the political purposes of President Bush and his top advisers? The record of the past three years gives rise to the suspicion that this is precisely what is afoot.

Running Scared

While Iraq generally has moved off the front page, those paying attention to developments there have watched a transition from mayhem to bedlam in recent days. Worse still, the U.S. economy is again faltering as the election draws near.

Perhaps most worrisome of all from the administration's point of view are the fresh photos, film footage, and other reporting of torture in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and elsewhere that will surface in the coming weeks. This round is said to include details of the rape and other abuse of some of the Iraqi women and the hundred or so children-some as young as 10 years old-held in jails like Abu Graib. U.S. Army Sergeant Samuel Provance, who was stationed there, has blown the whistle on the abuse of children as well as other prisoners. He recounted, for example, how interrogators soaked a 16-year-old, covered him in mud, and then used his suffering to break the youth's father, also a prisoner, during interrogation.

I suspect it is the further revelations of torture that worries the White House most. Adding to its woes, last week over a hundred lawyers, including seven past presidents of the American Bar Association and former FBI Director William Sessions, issued a statement strongly condemning the legal opinions of government attorneys holding that torture might be legally defensible. The lawyers called for an investigation regarding whether there is a connection between those legal opinions and the abuses at Abu Graib and elsewhere.

While Bush administration officials have tried to distance themselves from the opinions and claim that the president did not authorize the torture of suspected al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters, the photographic evidence speaks for itself. And neo-conservative William Kristol's bragging Sunday on ABC's This Week that this administration's interrogation techniques have been successful because they are "rougher than what John Kerry would approve of" does not help the administration's case.

With each new revelation of torture, the "few-bad-apples" explanation strains credulity closer to the breaking point. Nor can it be denied that the abuse took place on this administration's watch. Thus, there are likely to be increasing demands that the commander-in-chief-or at least his defense secretary-take responsibility. Where is it that the buck is supposed to stop?

Connecting Dots

What has all this to do with Condoleezza Rice's multiple mention of "pre-election threats?" Can these two dots be connected? I fear they can.

When John Ashcroft fired the opening shot in this campaign to raise the specter of a "pre-election" terrorist event, it seemed to me that the administration might be beginning to prepare the American people to accept postponement or cancellation of the November election as a reasonable option.

Tom Ridge's warning in early July that Osama bin Laden is "planning to disrupt the November elections" added to my concern, as did:

-- Word that Ridge has asked the Department of Justice to analyze what legal steps would be needed to permit postponement of the election;

-- The request by the Director of the Election Assistance Commission for Ridge to provide "guidelines" for canceling or rescheduling the election in the event of a terror attack;

-- The matter-of-fact tone of a recent vote on CNN's website: "Should the United States postpone the election in the event of a terrorist attack?" That vote seems to have been greeted more by yawns than by any expression of outrage.

-- That the House of Representatives on July 22 passed a resolution by a 419-2 vote denying any agency or individual the authority to postpone a national election suggests that many in Congress are taking the various trial balloons and other hints seriously.

The Emperor's New Suit of Clothes

It seems a safe bet that President Bush is not sleeping as soundly as he did before the abuse of prisoners came to light. He may fee thoroughly exposed in the magic suit of sold him by Ashcroft's tailor/lawyers together with those working for White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, and may wish he had paid more attention to the strong cautions of Secretary of State Colin Powell against playing fast and loose with the Geneva Conventions on Prisoners of War.

The president can take little consolation in Gonzales' reassurance that there is a "reasonable basis in law" that could provide a "solid defense," should an independent counsel at some point in the future attempt to prosecute him under the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 for exempting the Taliban and perhaps others from the protections of the Geneva Conventions, to which the War Crimes Act is inextricably tied.

Meaning? Meaning that if the president's numbers look no better in October than they do now, there will be particularly strong personal incentive on the part of the president, Rumsfeld, and Vice President Cheney to pull out all the stops in order to make four more years a sure thing. What seems increasingly clear is that putting off the election is under active consideration-a course more likely to be chosen to the extent it achieves status as just another option.

How Would Americans React?

On Friday I listened to a reporter asking a tourist in Washington, DC, whether he felt inconvenienced by all the blockages and barriers occasioned by the heightened alert. While the tourist acknowledged that the various barriers and inspections made it difficult to get from one place to another, he made his overall reaction quite clear: "Safety first! I don't want to see another 9/11. Whatever it takes!" I was struck a few hours later as I tuned into President Bush speaking at a campaign rally in Michigan: "I will never relent in defending America. Whatever it takes."

How prevalent this sentiment has become was brought home to me as Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) quizzed 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey (a former Democrat Senator from Nebraska) at a hearing last week on the commission's sweeping recommendation to centralize foreign and domestic intelligence under a new National Intelligence Director in the White House. Kerrey grew quite angry as Kucinich kept insisting on an answer to his question: "How do you protect civil liberties amid such a concentration of information and power?"

Kerrey protested that the terrorists give no priority to civil liberties. He went on to say that individual liberties must, in effect, be put on the back burner, while priority is given to combating terrorism. Whatever it takes.

Does this not speak volumes? Would Kerry suggest that Americans act like the "good Germans" of the 1930s, and acquiesce in draconian steps like postponement or cancellation of the November election?

These are no small matters. It is high time to think them through.

http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/04/08/con04327.html

FABRICATING TERROR

by William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t
August 4, 2004

Let me get this straight.

Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge came barnstorming out on Sunday with a blizzard of warnings about looming terror attacks against targets in New York, New Jersey and Washington DC. Our nifty color-coded alert system was raised to Orange, or High. Headlines from coast to coast blared the bad news, and the stock market began Monday by giving itself a sound beating.

Late Monday night, however, had articles popping up on the Washington Post and the New York Times. This was the Post's midnight take: "Most of the al-Qaeda surveillance of five financial institutions that led to a new terrorism alert Sunday was conducted before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and authorities are not sure whether the casing of the buildings has continued, numerous intelligence and law enforcement officials said yesterday...'There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new,' said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. 'Why did we go to this level? I still don't know that.'"

The data was three years old.

Tom Ridge, in his Sunday remarks, said, "President Bush has told you, and I have reiterated the promise, that when we have specific credible information, that we will share it. Now this afternoon, we do have new and unusually specific information about where al-Qaeda would like to attack."

The data was three years old.

"The quality of this intelligence," said Ridge on Sunday, "based on multiple reporting streams in multiple locations, is rarely seen and it is alarming in both the amount and specificity of the information."

The data was three years old.

"As of now," said Ridge on Sunday, "this is what we know: reports indicate that al-Qaeda is targeting several specific buildings, including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in the District of Columbia; Prudential Financial in Northern New Jersey; and Citigroup buildings and the New York Stock Exchange in New York."

The data was three years old.

"I certainly realize that this is sobering news," said Ridge on Sunday, "not just about the intent of our enemies, but of their specific plans and a glimpse into their methods."

The data was three years old.

"But we must understand," said Ridge on Sunday, "that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the President's leadership in the war against terror."

The data was three years old.

Furthermore, according to the Washington Post, "Several officials also said that much of the information compiled by terrorist operatives about the buildings in Washington, New York and Newark was obtained through the Internet or other 'open sources' available to the general public, including some floor plans." The data was three years old, gathered on the Internet, and delivered to the American people in tones of doom, as if the hammer were about to fall at any moment.

As reported on the Bloomberg newswire, Laura Bush and the daughters Barbara and Jenna Bush held a photo-op at the Citigroup Center in New York City on Monday, the first day of Ridge's new Orange alert. This was one of the target buildings, according to Ridge. George W. Bush sent his entire family to the very place that was supposedly about to be blown to smithereens?

I don't think so.

George W. Bush and his administration officials are using terrorism - the fear of it, the fight against it - to manipulate domestic American politics. They are, as they have every day for almost three years now, using September 11 against their own people. They are also getting stumblingly obvious about it. We are being lied to, clumsily, again.

Do you doubt it? Recall, if you will, the report in July by John Judis, Spencer Ackerman, and Massoud Ansari of the New Republic titled 'July Surprise'. The report read, "This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. A succession of high-level American officials--from outgoing CIA Director George Tenet to Secretary of State Colin Powell to Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to State Department counterterrorism chief Cofer Black to a top CIA South Asia official--have visited Pakistan in recent months to urge General Pervez Musharraf's government to do more in the war on terrorism."

The kicker appears in the next paragraph: "A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed TNR that the Pakistanis 'have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs (High Value Targets) before [the] election is [an] absolute must.' What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: 'The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington.'... But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that 'it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July'--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston."

On the Thursday of the Democratic convention in Boston, the day John Kerry was to accept the nomination and deliver the central speech of the week, Pakistan announced the capture of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian Al Qaeda operative wanted in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Pakistan, it seems, got the message from Tenet, Powell, Rocca, Black and the Bush administration itself.

They delivered the terrorist exactly on cue.

In that instance, clearly Bush's people wanted to use terrorism to deflect attention from the Democratic convention. What were they trying to distract us from with this Sunday warning nonsense?

It is possible they are looking to dissuade some of the 500,000 protesters, who are planning to surround the Republican convention in New York at the end of the month, from making the trip. Yet that seems unlikely; the convention is three weeks away, so it is a bit early to start scaring people. More likely, they are looking to distract from the poll-numbers bump Kerry and Edwards are enjoying in the aftermath of a highly successful convention. Could it be as simple and craven as that? Absolutely yes, it could.

Perhaps more interesting is the manner in which this fraud was exposed. Ridge made the announcement on Sunday, and within 24 hours, a whole crowd of 'officials' roared out to expose the dated nature of the information. In other words, the long-abused intelligence community saw the Bush administration jerking the terror alert system around, and threw a few torpedoes into their side.

That Bush and his people are using terror to manipulate the American people isn't the worst part of this, hard as that may be to believe. The worst part of this is that September 11 happened, that warnings of a potential attack are necessary to the public safety when merited, and that every time Bush uses these warnings to assist his election campaign, the people tune out the warnings even further. This may well get a lot of people killed someday. When you cry wolf long enough, people will ignore you when the wolf actually comes to the door.

What's next?

I can see it now. A flash will come across the wires some morning soon: The Homeland Security Department has released an Orange Alert notification, based on credible and up-to-date evidence, that a bug in millions of computer systems could cause major disruptions at the turn of the millennium.

They are thinking of calling it 'The Millennium Terrabug.' Keep your eyes peeled.

THE DAY THE CONSTITUTION DIED

In order to justify torture, these memos declare that the president is bound by neither U.S. law nor international treaties. We have put ourselves on the same moral level as Saddam Hussein, the only difference being quantity. Quite literally, the president may as well wear a crown - forget that "no man is above the law" jazz. We used to talk about "the imperial presidency" under Nixon, but this is the real thing.

The Pentagon's legal staff concurred in this incredible conclusion. In a report printed by The Wall Street Journal, "Bush administration lawyers contended last year that the president wasn't bound by laws prohibiting torture and that government agents who might torture prisoners at his direction couldn't be prosecuted by the Justice Department. ...

"The report outlined U.S. laws and international treaties forbidding torture, and why those restrictions might be overcome by national security considerations or legal technicalities."

The report was complied by a group appointed by Department of Defense General Counsel William J. Haynes II, who has since been nominated by Bush for the federal appellate bench. "Air Force General Counsel Mary Walker headed the group, which comprised top civilian and uniformed lawyers from each military branch and consulted with the Justice Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies. It isn't known if President Bush has ever seen the report."

When members of the Senate Judiciary Committee questioned Ashcroft about his department's input, he simply refused to provide the memos, without offering any legal rationale. He said President Bush had "made no order that would require or direct the violation" of laws or treaties. His explanation was that the United States is at war. "You know I condemn torture," he told Sen. Joe Biden. "I don't think it's productive, let alone justified."

But another memo written by former Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge in California, establishes a basis for the use of torture for senior Al Qaeda operatives in custody of the CIA. I am not one to leap to conclusions, but it seems quite clear how whatever perverted standards allowed at Guantanamo Bay jumped across the water to Abu Ghraib prison. Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, commander at Gitmo, was dispatched last August to Abu Ghraib to give advice about how to get information out of prisoners. "Miller's recommendations prompted a shift in the interrogation and detention procedures there. Military intelligence officers were given greater authority in the prison, and military police guards were asked to help gather information about the detainees," according to The New York Times.

Among the legal memos that circulated within the administration in 2002, one is by White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, famously declaring the Geneva Convention "quaint," and another from the CIA asked for an explicit understanding that the administration's public pledge to abide by the spirit of the Geneva Convention did not apply to its operatives. The only department consistently opposing these legal "arguments" was State. In April 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld sent a memo to Gen. James T. Hill outlining 24 permitted interrogation techniques, four of which were considered so stressful as to require Rumsfeld's explicit approval before they were used.

It has been apparent for some time that the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not isolated instances - torture from Afghanistan to Gitmo to Iraq has so far resulted in 25 deaths now under investigation. As the late Jacabo Timmermann, the Argentine journalist who was tortured during "the dirty war," said, "When you are being tortured, it doesn't really matter to you if your torturers are authoritarian or totalitarian." I doubt it helps any if they're supposed to be bringing democracy, either. And as Ashcroft said, it isn't productive.

The damage is incalculable. When America puts out its annual report on human rights abuses, we will be a laughingstock. I suggest a special commission headed by Sen. John McCain to dig out everyone responsible, root and branch. If the lawyers don't cooperate, perhaps we should try stripping them, anally raping them and dunking their heads under water until they think they're drowning, and see if that helps.

And I think it is time for citizens to take some responsibility, as well. Is this what we have come to? Is this what we want our government to do for us? Oh and by way, to my fellow political reporters who keep repeating that Bush is having a wonderful week: Why don't you think about what you stand for?

Molly Ivins writes for Texas Oberserver.
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18919

THE WAR OF THE WORDS

by Terry Jones
The Guardian
April 30, 2004

One of the chief problems with the current exciting adventure in Iraq is that no one can agree on what to call anyone else.

In the second world war we were fighting the Germans, and the Germans were fighting us. Everyone agreed who was fighting who. That's what a proper war is like.

However, in Iraq, there isn't even any agreement on what to call the Americans. The Iraqis insist on calling them "Americans", which seems, on the face of it, reasonable. The Americans, however, insist on referring to themselves as "coalition forces". This is probably the first time in history that the United States has tried to share its military glory with someone else.

Hollywood, for example, is forever telling us it was the Americans who won the second world war. It was an American who led the break-out from the prison camp Stalag Luft III in The Great Escape; the Americans who captured the Enigma machine in the film U571; and Tom Cruise who single-handedly won the Battle of Britain (in his latest project, The Few).

So I suppose it's reassuring to find the US generals in Iraq so keen to emphasise the role played by America's partners in bringing a better way of life to Iraq.

Then there's the problem of what the Americans are going to call the Iraqis - especially the ones that they kill. You can call people who are defending their own homes from rockets and missiles launched from helicopters and tanks "fanatics and terrorists" only for so long. Eventually even newspaper readers will smell a rat.

Similarly it's fiendishly difficult to get people to accept the label "rebels" for those Iraqis killed by American snipers when - as in Falluja - they turn out to be pregnant women, 13-year-old boys and old men standing by their front gates.

It also sounds a bit lame to call ambulance drivers "fighters" - when they've been shot through the windscreen in the act of driving the wounded to hospital - and yet what other word can you use without making them sound like illegitimate targets?

I hope you're beginning to see the problem.

The key thing, I suppose, is to try to call US mercenaries "civilians" or "civilian contractors", while calling Iraqi civilians "fighters" or "insurgents".

Describing the recent attack on Najaf, the New York Times happily hit upon the word "militiamen". This has the advantage of being a bit vague (nobody really knows what a "militiaman" looks like or does), while at the same time sounding like the sort of foreigners any responsible government ought to kill on sight.

However, the semantic problems in Iraq run even deeper than that.

For example, there's the "handover of power" that's due to take place on June 30. Since no actual "power" is going to be handed over, the coalition chaps have had to find a less conclusive phrase. They now talk about the handover of "sovereignty", which is a suitably elastic notion. And besides, handing over a "notion" is a damn sight easier than handing over anything concrete.

Then again, the US insists that it has been carrying out "negotiations" with the mojahedin in Falluja. These "negotiations" consist of the US military demanding that the mojahedin hand over all their rocket-propelled grenade launchers, in return for which the US military will not blast the city to kingdom come. Now there's a danger that this all sounds like one side "threatening" the other, rather than "negotiations" - which, after all, usually implies some give and take on both sides.

As for the word "ceasefire", it's difficult to know what this signifies anymore. According to reliable witness reports from Falluja, the new American usage makes generous allowance for dropping cluster bombs and flares, and deploying artillery and snipers.

But perhaps the most exciting linguistic development is to be found away from the areas of conflict - in the calm of the Oval Office, where very few people get killed for looking out of their windows. Here words such as "strategy" and "policy" are daily applied to the kneejerk reactions of politicians and military commanders who think that brute force is the only way to resolve difficult problems in a delicate situation. As Major Kevin Collins, one of the officers in charge of the marines in Falluja, put it: "If you choose to pick a fight, we'll finish it."

In the past, one might have used a phrase such as "numbskull stupidity" rather than "strategy". But then, language has a life of its own .... which is more than one can say for a lot of innocent Iraqis.

DREAMERS AND IDIOTS - Britain and the US did everything to avoid a peaceful solution in Iraq and Afghanistan

Tuesday, November 11, 2003

The Guardian

Those who would take us to war must first shut down the public

imagination.

They must convince us that there is no other means of preventing

invasion,

or conquering terrorism, or even defending human rights. When

information is

scarce, imagination is easy to control. As intelligence gathering and

diplomacy are conducted in secret, we seldom discover - until it

is too late

- how plausible the alternatives may be.

So those of us who called for peace before the wars with Iraq and

Afghanistan were mocked as effeminate dreamers. The intelligence our

governments released suggested that Saddam Hussein and the Taliban were

immune to diplomacy or negotiation. Faced with such enemies,

what would we

do, the hawks asked? And our responses felt timid beside the clanking

rigours of war. To the columnist David Aaronovitch, we were

"indulging... in

a cosmic whinge". To the Daily Telegraph, we had become "Osama

bin Laden's

useful idiots".

Had the options been as limited as the western warlords and their bards

suggested, this might have been true. But, as many of us suspected at the

time, we were lied to. Most of the lies are now familiar: there appear to

have been no weapons of mass destruction and no evidence to

suggest that, as

President Bush claimed in March, Saddam had "trained and financed...

al-Qaeda". Bush and Blair, as their courtship of the president

of Uzbekistan

reveals, appear to possess no genuine concern for the human rights of

foreigners.

But a further, and even graver, set of lies is only now

beginning to come to

light. Even if all the claims Bush and Blair made about their enemies and

their motives had been true, and all their objectives had been legal and

just, there may still have been no need to go to war. For, as we

discovered

last week, Saddam proposed to give Bush and Blair almost everything they

wanted before a shot had been fired. Our governments appear both to have

withheld this information from the public and to have lied to us

about the

possibilities for diplomacy.

Over the four months before the coalition forces invaded Iraq, Saddam's

government made a series of increasingly desperate offers to the United

States. In December, the Iraqi intelligence services approached Vincent

Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, with an offer to

prove that Iraq was not linked to the September 11 attacks, and to permit

several thousand US troops to enter the country to look for

weapons of mass

destruction. If the object was regime change, then Saddam, the agents

claimed, was prepared to submit himself to internationally monitored

elections within two years. According to Mr. Cannistraro, these proposals

reached the White House, but were "turned down by the president and

vice-president".

By February, Saddam's negotiators were offering almost everything the US

government could wish for: free access to the FBI to look for weapons of

mass destruction wherever it wanted, support for the US position

on Israel

and Palestine, even rights over Iraq's oil. Among the people

they contacted

was Richard Perle, the security adviser who for years had been

urging a war

with Iraq. He passed their offers to the CIA. Last week he told

the New York

Times that the CIA had replied: "Tell them that we will see them in

Baghdad".

Saddam Hussein, in other words, appears to have done everything

possible to

find a diplomatic alternative to the impending war, and the US government

appears to have done everything necessary to prevent one. This is the

opposite to what we were told by George Bush and Tony Blair. On

March 6, 13

days before the war began, Bush said to journalists: "I want to

remind you

that it's his choice to make as to whether or not we go to war. It's

Saddam's choice. He's the person that can make the choice of war

and peace.

Thus far, he's made the wrong choice."

Ten days later, Blair told a press conference: "We have provided

the right

diplomatic way through this, which is to lay down a clear ultimatum to

Saddam: cooperate or face disarmament by force... all the way through we

have tried to provide a diplomatic solution." On March 17, Bush

claimed that

"should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know

that every measure has been taken to avoid war". All these statements are

false.

The same thing happened before the war with Afghanistan. On September 20,

2001, the Taliban offered to hand Osama bin Laden to a neutral Islamic

country for trial if the US presented them with evidence that he was

responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington. The US

rejected the

offer. On October 1, six days before the bombing began, they repeated it,

and their representative in Pakistan told reporters: "We are ready for

negotiations. It is up to the other side to agree or not. Only

negotiation

will solve our problems." Bush was asked about this offer at a press

conference the following day. He replied: "There's no

negotiations. There's

no calendar. We'll act on [sic] our time."

On the same day, Tony Blair, in his speech to the Labour party

conference,

ridiculed the idea that we could "look for a diplomatic

solution". "There is

no diplomacy with Bin Laden or the Taliban regime... I say to

the Taliban:

surrender the terrorists; or surrender power. It's your choice."

Well, they

had just tried to exercise that choice, but George Bush had rejected it.

Of course, neither Bush nor Blair had any reason to trust the Taliban or

Saddam - these people were, after all, negotiating under duress.

But neither

did they have any need to trust them. In both cases they could have

presented their opponents with a deadline for meeting the

concessions they

had offered. Nor could the allies argue that the offers were not worth

considering because they were inadequate: both the Taliban and

Saddam were

attempting to open negotiations, not to close them - there appeared to be

plenty of scope for bargaining. In other words, peaceful resolutions were

rejected before they were attempted. What this means is that

even if all the

other legal tests for these wars had been met (they had not), both would

still have been waged in defiance of international law. The

charter of the

United Nations specifies that "the parties to any

dispute...shall, first of

all, seek a solution by negotiation".

None of this matters to the enthusiasts for war. That these

conflicts were

unjust and illegal, that they killed or maimed tens of thousands of

civilians, is irrelevant, as long as their aims were met. So the hawks

should ponder this. Had a peaceful resolution of these disputes been

attempted, Bin Laden might now be in custody, Iraq might be a pliant and

largely peaceful nation finding its own way to democracy, and

the prevailing

sentiment within the Muslim world might be sympathy for the

United States,

rather than anger and resentment.

Now who are the dreamers and the useful idiots, and who the pragmatists?

WE REPORT, YOU GET IT WRONG

By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - The more commercial television news you watch, the more wrong

you are likely to be about key elements of the Iraq War and its aftermath,

according to a major new study released in Washington on Thursday.

And the more you watch the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News channel, in

particular, the more likely it is that your perceptions about the war are

wrong, adds the report by the University of Maryland's Program on

International Policy Attitudes (PIPA).

Based on several nationwide surveys it conducted with California-based

Knowledge Networks since June, as well as the results of other polls, PIPA

found that 48 percent of the public believe US troops found evidence of

close pre-war links between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist group; 22

percent thought troops found weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq; and

25 percent believed that world public opinion favored Washington's going to

war with Iraq. All three are misperceptions.

The report, Misperceptions, the Media and the Iraq War, also found that the

more misperceptions held by the respondent, the more likely it was that s/he

both supported the war and depended on commercial television for news about

it.

The study is likely to stoke a growing public and professional debate over

why mainstream news media - especially the broadcast media - were not more

skeptical about the Bush administration's pre-war claims, particularly

regarding Saddam Hussein's WMD stockpiles and ties with al-Qaeda.

"This is a dangerously revealing study," said Marvin Kalb, a former

television correspondent and a senior fellow of the Shorenstein Center on

the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at

Harvard University.

While Kalb said he had some reservations about the specificity of the

questions directed at the respondents, he noted that, "People who have had a

strong belief that there is an unholy alliance between politics and the

press now have more evidence." Fox, in particular, has been accused of

pursuing a chauvinistic agenda in its news coverage despite its motto, "We

report, you decide".

Overall, according to PIPA, 60 percent of the people surveyed held at least

one of the three misperceptions through September. Thirty percent of

respondents had none of those misperceptions.

Surprisingly, the percentage of people holding the misperceptions rose

slightly over the last three months. In July, for example, polls found that

45 percent of the public believed US forces had found "clear evidence in

Iraq that Hussein was working closely with al-Qaeda". In September, 49

percent believed that.

Likewise, those who believed troops had found WMD in Iraq jumped from 21

percent in July to 24 percent in September. One in five respondents said

they believed that Iraq had actually used chemical or biological weapons

during the war.

In determining what factors could create the misperceptions, PIPA considered

a number of variables in the data.

It found a high correlation between respondents with the most misperceptions

and their support for the decision to go to war. Only 23 percent of those

who held none of the three misperceptions supported the war, while 53

percent who held one misperception did so. Of those who believe that both

WMDs and evidence of al-Qaeda ties have been found in Iraq and that world

opinion backed the United States, a whopping 86 percent said they supported

war.

More specifically, among those who believed that Washington had found clear

evidence of close ties between Hussein and al-Qaeda, two-thirds held the

view that going to war was the best thing to do. Only 29 percent felt that

way among those who did not believe that such evidence had been found.

Another factor that correlated closely with misperceptions about the war was

party affiliation, with Republicans substantially "more likely" to hold

misperceptions than Democrats. But support for Bush himself as expressed by

whether or not the respondent said s/he intended to vote for him in 2004

appeared to be an even more critical factor.

The average frequency of misperceptions among respondents who planned to

vote for Bush was 45 percent, while among those who plan to vote for a

hypothetical Democrat candidate, the frequency averaged only 17 percent.

Asked "Has the US found clear evidence Saddam Hussein was working closely

with al-Qaeda"? 68 percent of Bush supporters replied affirmatively. By

contrast, two of every three Democrat-backers said no.

But news sources also accounted for major differences in misperceptions,

according to PIPA, which asked more than 3,300 respondents since May where

they "tended to get most of [their] news''. Eighty percent identified

broadcast media, while 19 percent cited print media.

Among those who said broadcast media, 30 percent said two or more networks;

18 percent, Fox News; 16 percent, CNN; 24 percent, the three big networks -

NBC (14 percent), ABC (11 percent), CBS (9 percent); and three percent, the

two public networks, National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting

Service (PBS).

For each of the three misperceptions, the study found enormous differences

between the viewers of Fox, who held the most misperceptions, and NPR/PBS,

who held the fewest by far.

Eighty percent of Fox viewers were found to hold at least one misperception,

compared to 23 percent of NPR/PBS consumers. All the other media fell in

between.

CBS ranked right behind Fox with a 71 percent score, while CNN and NBC tied

as the best-performing commercial broadcast audience at 55 percent.

Forty-seven percent of print media readers held at least one misperception.

As to the number of misconceptions held by their audiences, Fox far

outscored all of its rivals. A whopping 45 percent of its viewers believed

all three misperceptions, while the other commercial networks scored between

12 percent and 16 percent. Only nine percent of readers believed all three,

while only four percent of the NPR/PBS audience did.

PIPA found that political affiliation and news source also compound one

another. Thus, 78 percent of Bush supporters who watch Fox News said they

thought the United States had found evidence of a direct link to al-Qaeda,

while 50 percent of Bush supporters who rely on NPR/PBS thought so.

Conversely, 48 percent of Fox viewers who said they would support a Democrat

believed that such evidence had been found. But none of the Democrat-backers

who relied on NPR/PBS believed it.

The study also debunked the notion that misperceptions were due mainly to

the lack of exposure to news.

Among Bush supporters, those who said they follow the news "very closely",

were found more likely to hold misperceptions. Those Bush supporters, on the

other hand, who say they follow the news "somewhat closely" or "not closely

at all" held fewer misperceptions.

Conversely, those Democratic supporters who said they did not follow the

news very closely were found to be twice as likely to hold misperceptions as

those who said they did, according to PIPA.

LECONS SUR LA FACON DE MENTIR A PROPOS DE L'IRAK, PAR BRIAN ENO

Traduction d’un article paru dans l’Observer (Royaume-Uni) le 17 août, 2003-08-26

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Le problème n'est pas la propagande, mais l'implacable contrôle sur les choses à propos desquelles nous pensons.

Quand j'ai visité pour la première fois la Russie, en 1986, je me suis lié d'amitié avec un musicien dont le père avait été le docteur personnel de Leonid Brejnev. Un jour nous parlions de la vie pendant "la période de stagnation" - l'ère de Brejnev.

« Cela devait être étrange d'être si complètement immergé dans la propagande, » ai-je dit.

« Oh, mais il y a une différence. Nous savions que c'était la propagande, » a répondu Sacha.

C'est ça la différence. La propagande russe était si évidente que la plupart des Russes étaient capables de l'ignorer. Ils considéraient comme allant de soi que le gouvernement fonctionnait selon ses intérêts propres et n'importe quel message venant de lui, vraisemblablement truqué, n'avait aucune valeur.

À l'Ouest, la manipulation calculée de l'opinion publique pour servir des intérêts politiques et idéologiques est beaucoup plus secrète et donc beaucoup plus efficace. Son triomphe le plus grand est que nous ne le remarquons généralement pas - ou rions de son existence même. Nous observons le processus démocratique qui se passe - des débats contradictoires dans lesquels nous estimons que notre voix pourrait avoir de l'influence - et penser que, parce que nous avons des médias "libres", ce serait dur pour le Gouvernement d'échapper à quoi que ce soit qui ressemble à un mensonge sans que quelqu'un ne les interpelle à ce sujet.

Il faut qu'il y ait eu quelque chose d'aussi spectaculaire que l'invasion de l'Irak pour nous faire regarder d'un peu plus près et demander : "comment en sommes-nous arrivés là ?" Comment exactement a-t-il été possible que dans un monde où règne le Sida, le Réchauffement global, avec 30 guerres en cours, plusieurs famines, le clonage, les manipulations génétiques et deux milliards de personnes dans la pauvreté, pratiquement la seule chose dont nous avons tous parlé de pendant une année était l'Irak et Saddam Hussein ? Est-ce que cela était vraiment un grand problème ? Ou bien avons-nous été endoctrinés dans la croyance que la question de l'Irak était importante et devait être résolue immédiatement - bien que quelques mois avant, personne ne l'avait mentionné et que rien n'avait changé entre temps.

À la suite des événements du 11 septembre 2001, il semble maintenant clair que le choc des attaques a été exploité en Amérique. Selon Sheldon Rampton et John Stauber dans leur nouveau livre les Armes de Tromperie Massive, ce choc a été utilisé pour créer un état d'urgence qui justifierait une invasion de l'Irak. Rampton et Stauber exposent comment les nouvelles ont été fabriquées et faites pour faire « vrai ». Mais ils expliquent aussi comment une coalition de résolus - des fonctionnaires d'extrême droite, des groupes de réflexion néo-conservateurs, d'hargneux commentateurs de médias et des sociétés de relations publiques très bien payées - a travaillé pour mettre au point un sensationnel scénario de malhonnêteté intellectuelle. Leur travail est une étude de la propagande moderne.

Le sentiment que j'ai eu à la lecture de leur livre c'est que la nouvelle approche États-Unienne du contrôle social est tellement plus sophistiquée et pénétrante qu'elle mérite vraiment un nouveau nom. Ce n'est pas juste de la propagande désormais, c'est un "agenda de propagande" (jeu de mot en anglais entre propaganda et prop-agenda, Ndt). Ce n'est pas tellement le contrôle de ce que nous pensons, mais le contrôle de ce que nous pensons "sur". Quand nos gouvernements veulent nous vendre un cours d'action, ils le font en s'assurant c'est la seule chose à l'ordre du jour, la seule chose dont chacun va parler. Et ils initient la discussion à venir avec des images subtilement choisies, des mensonges et des fausses infos, des liens douteux, du renseignement bidonné et "des fuites" choisies. (Est-ce que la querelle entre la B.B.C. et Alastair Campbell n'en constitue pas l'exemple typique ?)

Avec un terreau si bien préparé, les gouvernements sont heureux si vous utilisez alors "le processus démocratique" pour être d'accord ou n'être pas d'accord - puisque après tout, leur intention est de mobiliser assez de unes de journaux et de conversation pour donner l'impression que tout cela est réel et urgent. Plus le débat est émotionnel, mieux c'est. L'émotion crée la réalité, et la réalité impose qu'on agisse.

Un exemple de ce processus est celui mis en évidence par Rampton et Stauber qui, plus que n'importe quel autre, a consolidé l'approbation publique et celle du congrès pour la guerre de Golfe de 1991. Nous nous rappelons les histoires horrifiantes, répétées sans fin, de bébés dans les hôpitaux Koweïti, retirés de force de leurs incubateurs et abandonnés mourants, 312 bébés disait-on, tandis que les Irakiens expédiaient les incubateurs à Bagdad.

L'histoire a été portée à l'attention du public par Nayirah, "une infirmière" de 15 ans qui, cela fut avéré plus tard, était la fille de l'ambassadeur koweïtien aux États-Unis et membre de la famille royale koweïtienne. Nayirah avait été briefée par l'agence de RP Hill & Knowlton (qui a à son tour reçu 14 millions de dollars du gouvernement américain pour leur travail dans la promotion de la guerre). Son histoire a été entièrement discréditée quelques semaines plus tard, mais à ce moment-là le but était atteint : elle avait créé une réaction émotionnelle et un sentiment d'horreur en Amérique qui a escamoté toute discussion rationnelle.

Comme nous voyons aujourd'hui, la nouvelle guerre du Golfe a été le théâtre de nombreuses duperies semblables : de faux liens établis entre Saddam, Al-Qaeda et le 9/11, des histoires d'armes prêtes-au-lancement qui n'ont pas existé, des programmes nucléaires jamais lancés. Comme l'exposent Rampton et Stauber, beaucoup de ces allégations, bien que discréditées car fabriquées de toutes pièces - et ce journal ne fut pas le dernier à le dire - ont néanmoins été diffusées à nouveau.

Derrière tout cela, les sociétés de RP mercenaires étaient occupées à pré-conditionner le paysage émotionnel. Leurs talents de marketing étaient particulièrement utiles pour la manipulation à grande échelle des formules embrouillées utilisées dans la campagne. Les Bushites ont compris, comme tous les idéologues, que les mots créent des réalités et que les mots justes peuvent circonscrire n'importe quelle possibilité de discussion équilibrée. Guidées par la vision manifestement impériale du Projet pour un Nouveau Siècle Américain (dont les membres se forment maintenant le coeur de l'administration États-Unienne), les sociétés de RP ont mis au point des subterfuges langagiers afin de créer une atmosphère de panique bouillonnante où l'impérialisme États-Unien deviendrait non seulement acceptable, mais juste, évident, inévitable et même d'une façon ou d'une autre aimable.

À part l'incessant "les armes de destruction massive", il y avait "le changement de régime" (l'invasion militaire), "la défense de pré-emptive" (l'attaque d'un pays qui ne vous attaque pas), "les régions critiques » (des pays que nous voulons contrôler), "l'axe de mal" (des pays que nous voulons attaquer), "choc et effroi" (la destruction massive) et "la guerre à la terreur" (une excuse fourre-tout pour projeter la force militaire États-Unienne n'importe où).

En attendant, on a dit aux employés fédéraux États-Uniens et aux personnels militaires de se référer à l'invasion comme à "une guerre de libération" et aux paramilitaires irakiens comme à "des escadrons de la mort", tandis que les réseaux de TV États-Uniens, clairement flagorneurs, ont parlé de "l'Opération de Libération de l'Irak" - ainsi que leur a demandé le Pentagone - consolidant ainsi la supposition que la liberté irakienne était la raison de la guerre. Quelqu'un mettant en doute l'invasion était "faible avec la terreur" (libéral) ou, dans le cas de l'ONU, "en danger de perdre sa pertinence".

Quand j'étais jeune, un oncle excentrique a décidé de m'apprendre comment mentir. Non pas, m'a-t-il expliqué, parce qu'il voulait que je mente, mais parce qu'il estimait que je devrais savoir comment est fait le mensonge pour le reconnaître lorsque j'y serais confronté. J'espère que des auteurs comme Rampton et Stauber et d'autres peuvent avoir le même effet et aider à émasculer la culture de la dissimulation et de la manipulation d'opinion qui envahit nos structures politiques.

Une version plus longue de cet article paraîtra dans le nouveau magazine littéraire, Zembla. Les armes de Tromperie Massive par Sheldon Rampton et John Stauber sont publiées par Robinson.

Brian Eno vient de sortir l'album "January 07003" . Cet album expérimental est une initiative au profit de la "Long Now Foundation" , une association américaine qui promeut la pensée à long terme et la technologie durable. Leur projet phare : une horloge qui durera 10 000 ans . « Non pas vraiment parce que nous avons besoin de plus d'horloges dans le monde mais parce que nous avons besoin de plus d'incitations à contempler le futur distant de l'humanité, explique Eno. C'est une icône de la pensée à long terme. »

Traduction française de JRD pour le rezo des Humains Associés.

THE WAR ON TRUTH

THE ROAD OF COVERUP IS A ROAD TO RUIN

June 26, 2003

This new national security strategy is based upon pre-emptive war against those who might threaten our security.

Such a strategy of striking first against possible dangers is heavily reliant upon interpretation of accurate and timely intelligence. If we are going to hit first, based on perceived dangers, the perceptions had better be accurate. If our intelligence is faulty, we may launch pre-emptive wars against countries that do not pose a real threat against us. Or we may overlook countries that do pose real threats to our security, allowing us no chance to pursue diplomatic solutions to stop a crisis before it escalates to war. In either case lives could be needlessly lost. In other words, we had better be certain that we can discern the imminent threats from the false alarms.

Ninety-six days ago [as of June 24], President Bush announced that he had initiated a war to "disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger." The President told the world: "Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly--yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder." [Address to the Nation, 3/19/03]

The President has since announced that major combat operations concluded on May 1. He said: "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed." Since then, the United States has been recognized by the international community as the occupying power in Iraq. And yet, we have not found any evidence that would confirm the officially stated reason that our country was sent to war; namely, that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction constituted a grave threat to the United States.

We have heard a lot about revisionist history from the White House of late in answer to those who question whether there was a real threat from Iraq. But, it is the President who appears to me to be intent on revising history. There is an abundance of clear and unmistakable evidence that the Administration sought to portray Iraq as a direct and deadly threat to the American people. But there is a great difference between the hand-picked intelligence that was presented by the Administration to Congress and the American people when compared against what we have actually discovered in Iraq. This Congress and the people who sent us here are entitled to an explanation from the Administration.

On January 28, 2003, President Bush said in his State of the Union Address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." [State of the Union, 1/28/03, pg. 7] Yet, according to news reports, the CIA knew that this claim was false as early as March 2002. In addition, the International Atomic Energy Agency has since discredited this allegation.

On February 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council: "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent. That is enough to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets." [Remarks to UN Security Council, 2/5/03, pg. 12] The truth is, to date we have not found any of this material, nor those thousands of rockets loaded with chemical weapons.

On February 8, President Bush told the nation: "We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons--the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have." [Radio Address, 2/8/03] We are all relieved that such weapons were not used, but it has not yet been explained why the Iraqi army did not use them. Did the Iraqi army flee their positions before chemical weapons could be used? If so, why were the weapons not left behind? Or is it that the army was never issued chemical weapons? We need answers.

On March 16, the Sunday before the war began, in an interview with Tim Russert, Vice President Cheney said that Iraqis want "to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that." He added, "...the vast majority of them would turn on [Saddam Hussein] in in a minute if, in fact, they thought they could do so safely." [Meet the Press, 3/16/03, pg. 6] But in fact, today Iraqi cities remain in disorder, our troops are under attack, our occupation government lives and works in fortified compounds, and we are still trying to determine the fate of the ousted, murderous dictator.

On March 30, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, during the height of the war, said of the search for weapons of mass destruction: "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat." [This Week, 3/30/03, pg. 8] But Baghdad fell to our troops on April 9, and Tikrit on April 14, and the intelligence Secretary Rumsfeld spoke about has not led us to any weapons of mass destruction.

Whether or not intelligence reports were bent, stretched, or massaged to make Iraq look like an imminent threat to the United States, it is clear that the Administration's rhetoric played upon the well-founded fear of the American public about future acts of terrorism. But, upon close examination, many of these statements have nothing to do with intelligence, because they are at root just sound bites based on conjecture. They are designed to prey on public fear.

The face of Osama bin Laden morphed into that of Saddam Hussein. President Bush carefully blurred these images in his State of the Union Address. Listen to this quote from his State of the Union Address: "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans--this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known." [State of the Union, 1/28/03, pg. 7] Judging by this speech, not only is the President confusing al Qaeda and Iraq, but he also appears to give a vote of no-confidence to our homeland security efforts. Isn't the White House, the brains behind the Department of Homeland Security? Isn't the Administration supposed to be stopping those vials, canisters, and crates from entering our country, rather than trying to scare our fellow citizens half to death about them?

Not only did the Administration warn about more hijackers carrying deadly chemicals, the White House even went so far as to suggest that the time it would take for U.N. inspectors to find solid, 'smoking gun' evidence of Saddam's illegal weapons would put the U.S. at greater risk of a nuclear attack from Iraq. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice was quoted as saying on September 9, 2002, by the Los Angeles Times, "We don't want the 'smoking gun' to be a mushroom cloud." [Los Angeles Times, "Threat by Iraq Grows, U.S. Says," 9/9/02] Talk about hype! Mushroom clouds? Where is the evidence for this? There isn't any.

On September 26, 2002, just two weeks before Congress voted on a resolution to allow the President to invade Iraq, and six weeks before the mid-term elections, President Bush himself built the case that Iraq was plotting to attack the United States. After meeting with members of Congress on that date, the President said: "The danger to our country is grave. The danger to our country is growing. The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons.... The regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material, could build one within a year."

These are the President's words. He said that Saddam Hussein is "seeking a nuclear bomb." Have we found any evidence to date of this chilling allegation? No.

But, President Bush continued on that autumn day: "The dangers we face will only worsen from month to month and from year to year. To ignore these threats is to encourage them. And when they have fully materialized it may be too late to protect ourselves and our friends and our allies. By then the Iraqi dictator would have the means to terrorize and dominate the region. Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX--nerve gas--or some day a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally." [Rose Garden Remarks, 9/26/02]

And yet, seven weeks after declaring victory in the war against Iraq, we have seen nary a shred of evidence to support his claims of grave dangers, chemical weapons, links to al Qaeda, or nuclear weapons.

Just days before a vote on a resolution that handed the President unprecedented war powers, President Bush stepped up the scare tactics. On October 7, just four days before the October 11 vote in the Senate on the war resolution, the President stated: "We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy--the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade." President Bush continued: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses.... Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

President Bush also elaborated on claims of Iraq's nuclear program when he said: "The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear mujahideen'--his nuclear holy warriors.... If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year." [Cincinnati Museum Center, 10/7/02, pg. 3-4]

This is the kind of pumped up intelligence and outrageous rhetoric that were given to the American people to justify war with Iraq. This is the same kind of hyped evidence that was given to Congress to sway its vote for war on October 11, 2002.

We hear some voices say, but why should we care? After all, the United States won the war, didn't it? Saddam Hussein is no more; he is either dead or on the run. What does it matter if reality does not reveal the same grim picture that was so carefully painted before the war? So what if the menacing characterizations that conjured up visions of mushroom clouds and American cities threatened with deadly germs and chemicals were overdone? So what?

Our sons and daughters who serve in uniform answered a call to duty. They were sent to the hot sands of the Middle East to fight in a war that has already cost the lives of 194 Americans, thousands of innocent civilians, and unknown numbers of Iraqi soldiers. Our troops are still at risk. Hardly a day goes by that there is not another attack on the troops who are trying to restore order to a country teetering on the brink of anarchy. When are they coming home?

The President told the American people that we were compelled to go to war to secure our country from a grave threat. Are we any safer today than we were on March 18, 2003? Our nation has been committed to rebuilding a country ravaged by war and tyranny, and the cost of that task is being paid in blood and treasure every day.

It is in the compelling national interest to examine what we were told about the threat from Iraq. It is in the compelling national interest to know if the intelligence was faulty. It is in the compelling national interest to know if the intelligence was distorted.

Congress must face this issue squarely. Congress should begin immediately an investigation into the intelligence that was presented to the American people about the pre-war estimates of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and the way in which that intelligence might have been misused. This is no time for a timid Congress. We have a responsibility to act in the national interest and protect the American people. We must get to the bottom of this matter.

Although some timorous steps have been taken in the past few days to begin a review of this intelligence--I must watch my terms carefully, for I may be> tempted to use the words "investigation" or "inquiry" to describe this review, and those are terms which I am told are not supposed to be used--the proposed measures appear to fall short of what the situation requires. We are already shading our terms about how to describe the proposed review of intelligence: cherry-picking words to give the American people the impression that the government is fully in control of the situation, and that there is no reason to ask tough questions. This is the same problem that got us into this controversy about slanted intelligence reports. Word games. Lots and lots of word games.

Well, this is no game. For the first time in our history, the United States has gone to war because of intelligence reports claiming that a country posed a threat to our nation. Congress should not be content to use standard operating procedures to look into this extraordinary matter. We should accept no substitute for a full, bipartisan investigation by Congress into the issue of our pre-war intelligence on the threat from Iraq and its use.

The purpose of such an investigation is not to play pre-election year politics, nor is it to engage in what some might call "revisionist history." Rather it is to get at the truth. The longer questions are allowed to fester about what our intelligence knew about Iraq, and when they knew it, the greater the risk that the people--the American people whom we are elected to serve--will lose confidence in our government.

This looming crisis of trust is not limited to the public. Many of my colleagues were willing to trust the Administration and vote to authorize war against Iraq. Many members of this body trusted so much that they gave the President sweeping authority to commence war. As President Reagan famously said, "Trust, but verify." Despite my opposition, the Senate voted to blindly trust the President with unprecedented power to declare war. While the reconstruction continues, so do the questions, and it is time to verify.

I have served the people of West Virginia in Congress for half a century. I have witnessed deceit and scandal, cover up and aftermath. I have seen Presidents of both parties who once enjoyed great popularity among the people leave office in disgrace because they misled the American people. I say to this Administration: do not circle the wagons. Do not discourage the seeking of truth in these matters.

The American people have questions that need to be answered about why we went to war with Iraq. To attempt to deny the relevance of these questions is to trivialize the people's trust.

The business of intelligence is secretive by necessity, but our government is open by design. We must be straight with the American people. Congress has the obligation to investigate the use of intelligence information by the Administration, in the open, so that the American people can see that those who exercise power, especially the awesome power of preemptive war, must be held accountable. We must not go down the road of cover-up. That is the road to ruin.

Senator Robert C. Byrd represents West Virginia.

REP. WAXMAN'S LETTER TO CONDOLEEZA RICE

Forged Evidence

By Rep. Henry Waxman

Tuesday 10 June 2003

Dear Dr. Rice:

Since March 17, 2003, I have been trying without success to get a direct answer to one simple question: Why did President Bush cite forged evidence about Iraq's nuclear capabilities in his State of the Union address?

Although you addressed this issue on Sunday on both Meet the Press and This Week with George Stephanopoulos, your comments did nothing to clarify this issue. In fact, your responses contradicted other known facts and raised a host of new questions.

During your interviews, you said the Bush Administration welcomes inquiries into this matter. Yesterday, The Washington Post also reported that Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet has agreed to provide "full documentation" of the intelligence information "in regards to Secretary Powell's comments, the president's comments and anybody else's comments." Consistent with these sentiments, I am writing to seek further information about this important matter.

Bush Administration Knowledge of Forgeries

The forged documents in question describe efforts by Iraq to obtain uranium from an African country, Niger. During your interviews over the weekend, you asserted that no doubts or suspicions about these efforts or the underlying documents were communicated to senior officials in the Bush Administration before the President's State of the Union address. For example, when you were asked about this issue on Meet the Press, you made the following statement:

We did not know at the time -- no one knew at the time, in our circles -- maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency, but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery. Of course, it was information that was mistaken.

Similarly, when you appeared on This Week, you repeated this statement, claiming that you made multiple inquiries of the intelligence agencies regarding the allegation that Iraq sought to obtain uranium from an African country. You stated:

George, somebody, somebody down may have known. But I will tell you that when this issue was raised with the intelligence community... the intelligence community did not know at that time, or at levels that got to us, that this, that there were serious questions about this report.

Your claims, however, are directly contradicted by other evidence. Contrary to your assertion, senior Administration officials had serious doubts about the forged evidence well before the President's State of the Union address. For example, Greg Thielmann, Director of the Office of Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Issues in the State Department, told Newsweek last week that the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) had concluded the documents were "garbage." As you surely know, INR is part of what you call "the intelligence community." It is headed by an Assistant Secretary of State, Carl Ford; it reports directly to the Secretary of State; and it was a full participant in the debate over Iraq's nuclear capabilities. According to Newsweek:

"When I saw that, it really blew me away," Thielmann told Newsweek. Thielmann knew about the source of the allegation. The CIA had come up with some documents purporting to show Saddam had attempted to buy up to 500 tons of uranium oxide from the African country of Niger. INR had concluded that the purchases were implausible - and made that point clear to Powell's office. As Thielmann read that the president had relied on these documents to report to the nation, he thought, "Not that stupid piece of garbage. My thought was, how did that get into the speech?"

Moreover, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof has reported that the Vice President's office was aware of the fraudulent nature of the evidence as early as February 2002 - nearly a year before the President gave his State of the Union address. In his column, Mr. Kristof reported:

I'm told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president's office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade.... The envoy's debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted - except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

"It's disingenuous for the State Department people to say they were bamboozled because they knew about this for a year," one insider said.

When you were asked about Mr. Kristof's account, you did not deny his reporting. Instead, you conceded that "the Vice President's office may have asked for that report."

It is also clear that CIA officials doubted the evidence. The Washington Post reported on March 22 that CIA officials "communicated significant doubts to the administration about the evidence." The Los Angeles Times reported on March 15 that "the CIA first heard allegations that Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger in late 2001," when "the existence of the documents was reported to [the CIA] second- or third-hand." The Los Angeles Times quoted a CIA official as saying: "We included that in some of our reporting, although it was all caveated because we had concerns about the accuracy of that information."

With all respect, this is not a situation like the pre-9/11 evidence that al-Qaeda was planning to hijack planes and crash them into buildings. When you were asked about this on May 17, 2002, you said:

As you might imagine... a lot of things are prepared within agencies. They're distributed internally, they're worked internally. It's unusual that anything like that would get to the president. He doesn't recall seeing anything. I don't recall seeing anything of this kind.

That answer may be given more deference when the evidence in question is known only by a field agent in an FBI bureau in Phoenix, Arizona, whose suspicions are not adequately understood by officials in Washington. But it is simply not credible here. Contrary to your public statements, senior officials in the intelligence community in Washington knew the forged evidence was unreliable before the President used the evidence in the State of the Union address.

Other Evidence

This answer does not explain the President's statement in the State of the Union address. In his State of the Union address, the President referred specifically to the evidence from the British. He stated: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Presumably, the President would use the best available evidence in his State of the Union address to Congress and the nation. It would make no sense for him to cite forged evidence obtained from the British if, in fact, the United States had other reliable evidence that he could have cited.

Moreover, contrary to your assertion, there does not appear to be any other specific and credible evidence that Iraq sought to obtain uranium from an African country. The Administration has not provided any such evidence to me or my staff despite our repeated requests. To the contrary, the State Department wrote me that the "other source" of this claim was another Western European ally. But as the State Department acknowledged in its letter, "the second Western European government had based its assessment on the evidence already available to the U.S. that was subsequently discredited."

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also found no other evidence indicating that Iraq sought to obtain uranium from Niger. The evidence in U.S. possession that Iraq had sought to obtain uranium from Niger was transmitted to the IAEA. After reviewing all the evidence provided by the United States, the IAEA reported: "we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons programme in Iraq." Ultimately, the IAEA concluded: "these specific allegations are unfounded."

Questions

1. On Meet the Press, you said that "maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the agency" that the evidence cited by the President about Iraq's attempts to obtain uranium from Africa was suspect. Please identify the individual or individuals in the Administration who, prior to the President's State of the Union address, had expressed doubts about the validity of the evidence or the credibility of the claim.

2. Please identify any individuals in the Administration who, prior to the President's State of the Union address, were briefed or otherwise made aware that an individual or individuals in the Administration had expressed doubts about the validity of the evidence or the credibility of the claim.

3. On This Week, you said there was other evidence besides the forged evidence that Iraq was trying to obtain uranium from Africa. Please provide this other evidence.

4. When you were asked about reports that Vice President Cheney sent a former ambassador to Niger to investigate the evidence, you stated "the Vice President's office may have asked for that report." In light of this comment, please address:

(a) Whether Vice President Cheney or his office requested an investigation into claims that Iraq may have attempted to obtain nuclear material from Africa, and when any such request was made;

(b) Whether a current or former U.S. ambassador to Africa, or any other current or former government official or agent, traveled to Niger or otherwise investigated claims that Iraq may have attempted to obtain nuclear material from Niger; and

(c) What conclusions or findings, if any, were reported to the Vice President, his office, or other U.S. officials as a result of the investigation, and when any such conclusions or findings were reported.

Conclusion

What I want to know is the answer to a simple question: Why did the President use forged evidence in the State of the Union address? This is a question that bears directly on the credibility of the United States, and it should be answered in a prompt and forthright manner, with full disclosure of all the relevant facts.

Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

Sincerely,

Henry A. Waxman
Ranking Minority Member

WHY AMERICA IS WAKING UP

By Marion McKeone in New York
The Sunday Herald - UK

The leak has put the White House on the defensive as controversy over the non-discovery of WMD grows.

Hours after the report summary -- written by Defence Department in-house intelligence experts -- was leaked, the head of the DIA was dispatched to deny it contradicted the Bush administration's warnings of a dire, imminent threat to the US from Iraqi chemical weapons.

DIA Director Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby said the report showed his agency 'could not specifically pin down individual facilities operating as part of the WMD programs'. Pressed to explain the discrepancies between the report and administration claims, he said the report was 'not in any way intended to portray the fact that we had doubts that any programme existed, that such a programme was active, or that such a programme was part of the Iraqi WMD infrastructure'.

The leak appeared to catch the White House by surprise. One official said: 'Look, we are not the only people who claimed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. The rest of the world, including the UN Security Council, believed it too. The only person who claimed that Saddam didn't have weapons was Saddam.'

But the belief Saddam had stockpiled weapons -- and the imminent threat they posed -- was the core reason cited by Bush during his historic address to the UN last September. He cited evidence of a massive WMD programme, which he said was based on US intelligence and laid down an ultimatum to the UN: either disarm Saddam, or the US will. Asked whether Bush was aware of the DIA report when he warned the UN about the threat , the official declined to comment, saying it was 'unclear' whether Bush or any senior members of the administration had seen the report. It would, however, be unusual if Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, one of the most vigorous supporters of the war, had not read a report issued by his own in-house intelligence agency on the very issue upon which the war was predicated.

The alacrity of the White House response to the leak suggests it now believes the issue is a political danger for the President . Bush faces increasing pressure from influential lawmakers like Democratic senators Robert Byrd and Bob Graham who demand to know whether the administration manipulated intelligence to make the case for war.

That doubts about Iraqi weapons existed as far back as a year ago raises a number of unanswered questions . There is growing unease on Capitol Hill, as even Republican lawmakers feel the issue is a symptom of the massive increase in power Rumsfeld has awarded himself at the expense of the CIA and the Department of State.

'The basic problem here is that the office of the secretary of defence has become too powerful,'Patrick Lang, a former senior official in the DIA told the Senate. Others, including retired CIA analyst Larry Johnson, have publicly criticised CIA director George Tenet for allowing Rumsfeld to annex the CIA's role. 'Tenet sided with the defence crowd and cut the legs out from under his own analysts,'Johnson said.

Senior CIA officials have distanced themselves from Rumsfeld's claims that WMD posed an imminent threat. They say these claims are based on information passed directly to Rumsfeld's office by Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress and a Pentagon favourite to become the next Iraqi leader. But the CIA regarded his sources as deeply suspect and said his claims were largely based on hearsay from other defectors with vested interests in regime change.

The big question now is: was Bush was duped himself, or did he dupe the people into believing war was necessary? Some Democrats, sniffing blood, are poised to attack. Bob Graham, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, has claimed that before the war the administration embarked on 'a pattern of hiding information'. Classified evidence that supported its claims about weapons was made public, he said. 'But as a member of the Intelligence Committee I saw much evidence that didn't support its case,' he added. 'That evidence was never declassified. '

Tracey Schmitt, a Republican spokeswoman, dismissed Graham's comments. 'Senator Graham sounds increasingly more like a conspiracy theorist than a presidential candidate,'she said.

But even as CIA and Senate investigations into the quality of intelligence used in the build up the war in Iraq get under way, officials are denying that top members of the Bush administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, pressured the CIA into coming up with intelligence that would bolster the administration's case. It has been claimed by CIA officials that Cheney made repeated visits to the CIA to discuss intelligence about Iraq -- a highly unusual move for a vice-president. 'The vice president values the hard work of the intelligence community, but his office has a practice of declining to comment on the specifics of his intelligence briefings,' his public affairs director responded.

HIROSHIMA ANNIVERSARY

August marks another anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan, the ultimate act of terrorism in which 231,920 people have now died, the latest, the children of 1945, from a plague of cancers. : Pilger : 14 Aug 2003

LIES, LIES, LIES

U.S. Secretary of Hypocrisy, Donald Rumsfeld
shaking Saddam Hussein's hand in 1983

Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.

Dick Cheney
August 26, 2002

Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

George W. Bush
September 12, 2002

If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world.

Ari Fleischer
December 2, 2002

We know for a fact that there are weapons there.

Ari Fleischer
January 9, 2003

Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.

George W. Bush
January 28, 2003

We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more.

Colin Powell
February 5, 2003

We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.

George Bush
February 8, 2003

So has the strategic decision been made to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction by the leadership in Baghdad? I think our judgment has to be clearly not.

Colin Powell
March 8, 2003

Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

George Bush
March 17, 2003

Well, there is no question that we have evidence and information that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical particularly . . . all this will be made clear in the course of the operation, for whatever duration it takes.

Ari Fleisher
March 21, 2003

There is no doubt that the regime of Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction. As this operation continues, those weapons will be identified, found, along with the people who have produced them and who guard them.

Gen. Tommy Franks
March 22, 2003

I have no doubt we're going to find big stores of weapons of mass destruction.

Defense Policy Board member Kenneth Adelman
March 23, 2003

One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD. There are a number of sites.

Pentagon Spokeswoman Victoria Clark
March 22, 2003

We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.

Donald Rumsfeld
March 30, 2003

Obviously the administration intends to publicize all the weapons of mass destruction U.S. forces find -- and there will be plenty.

Neocon scholar Robert Kagan
April 9, 2003

I think you have always heard, and you continue to hear from officials, a measure of high confidence that, indeed, the weapons of mass destruction will be found.

Ari Fleischer
April 10, 2003

We are learning more as we interrogate or have discussions with Iraqi scientists and people within the Iraqi structure, that perhaps he destroyed some, perhaps he dispersed some. And so we will find them.

George Bush
April 24, 2003

There are people who in large measure have information that we need . . . so that we can track down the weapons of mass destruction in that country.

Donald Rumsfeld
April 25, 2003

We'll find them. It'll be a matter of time to do so.

George Bush
May 3, 2003

I am confident that we will find evidence that makes it clear he had weapons of mass destruction.

Colin Powell
May 4, 2003

I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country.

Donald Rumsfeld
May 4, 2003

I'm not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons program of Saddam Hussein -- because he had a weapons program.

George W. Bush
May 6, 2003

U.S. officials never expected that "we were going to open garages and find" weapons of mass destruction.

Condoleeza Rice
May 12, 2003

I just don't know whether it was all destroyed years ago -- I mean, there's no question that there were chemical weapons years ago -- whether they were destroyed right before the war, (or) whether they're still hidden.

Maj. Gen. David Petraeus
Commander 101st Airborne
May 13, 2003

Before the war, there's no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, biological and chemical. I expected them to be found. I still expect them to be found.

Gen. Michael Hagee, Commandant of the Marine Corps
May 21, 2003

Given time, given the number of prisoners now that we're interrogating, I'm confident that we're going to find weapons of mass destruction.

Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff
May 26, 2003

They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer.

Donald Rumsfeld
May 27, 2003

For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction (as justification for invading Iraq) because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.

Paul Wolfowitz
May 28, 2003

"We made it clear to the dictator of Iraq that he must disarm. He chose not to do so, so we disarmed him. And I know there's a lot of revisionist history now going on, but one thing is certain. He is no longer a threat to the free world."

President Bush
June 17
speech at North Virginia Community College in Annandale