Meet the U.S.

[Stormig]

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/03/06/...iraq/index.html

 

Deep divisions at the U.N.

Thursday, March 6, 2003 Posted: 6:47 PM EST (2347 GMT)

 

 

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger

 

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- As the United States marches toward a military showdown with Iraq, deep divisions at the United Nations are complicating life for the Bush administration.

 

As debate on a second resolution authorizing military force is set to begin, four of the 15 members of the United Nations Security Council are saying the United States hasn't made the case that now's the time for war against Iraq.

 

France, Germany, Russia and China say they won't support a second U.N. resolution giving a green light for war. And six more countries remain on the fence over the next steps.

 

As the diplomatic volleying picks up at the United Nations, a significant number of Americans also question a move to send U.S. troops into Iraq without the support of the international community.

 

A Gallup poll released Thursday shows that a majority of Americans -- 59 percent -- support military action against Iraq. This percentage has been steady for the last month. But the most recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll also shows that 40 percent of Americans would support sending U.S. troops to Iraq only if the United Nations approved a new resolution.

 

Divisions among U.N. members prompted a last-minute effort to add language inserting a specific deadline in a second U.N. resolution -- giving Iraq one last chance to disarm. CNN White House Correspondent John King reports that the United States is involved in these talks, but a U.S. official told King "the negotiations themselves cannot become a source of delay and delay. We need this settled soon."

 

The possibility of war, and, likely the monkey wrench thrown by traditional allies like France and Germany, prompted President Bush to schedule his second prime time news conference in the East Room of the White House since he took office.

 

Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Bush administration's chief ally, faces a dramatic drop in his approval ratings at home. Blair also decided to answer some tough questions on Thursday at a forum on the music channel MTV Europe. He said war could be avoided if Saddam disarmed or went into exile.

 

Leading public opinion

But Blair argued that it's important to lead public opinion as well as follow it.

 

"I think opinion does believe that Saddam's a bad man, that he's a threat, but I think the question that people are asking is: Is this the only way of dealing with it? That's more where people's minds are and worries are," Blair said. "And I'm saying no, it's not the only way of dealing with it, but we need him to decide to disarm voluntarily or else we're left not doing it at all."

 

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger discussed the divisions at the United Nations on Thursday's "Inside Politics."

 

"We have overcomplicated the issue," Kissinger said. "The United States has been attacked on its territory with thousands of casualties. All the United States is saying it cannot tolerate weapons of mass destruction in that region."

 

Kissinger said Iraq has a record of violating United Nations resolutions and now it's up to the U.N. whether it will allow this to continue.

 

He said it is important for President Bush to show respect for world opinion, but he told me he would have preferred that the United States invoke Article 51 of the United Nations charter, which defines the right to self-defense.

 

Separately, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski said on "Inside Politics" there has not been enough discussion about what it means to go to war against Iraq -- and he blames both Democrats and the Bush administration.

 

"I think we haven't had a real serious national debate in this country as to what this issue is about," Brzezinski said. "And we're dealing with kind of general slogans and images, a great deal of fear and panic. But I think that the Democrats are very much at fault in not generating a genuine debate. And I think the administration has been disingenuous in its argumentation."

 

Brzezinski, who advised President Jimmy Carter, questioned any move to press toward war without broader support.

 

"Doing it all by ourselves on our terms, ignoring the rest of the world, shouting loudly that if you're not with us, you are against us, is not going to be a very successful policy," Brzezinski said.

 

As U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and President Bush publicly press their case, it's unclear whether there will be one last chance for diplomacy, or whether the United States is ready to march on with the support it has today.

 

Judy Woodruff is CNN's prime anchor and senior correspondent. She is also anchor of "Inside Politics with Judy Woodruff."

[Stormig]

Mind you, I get a lot of this stuff via e-mail, so I don't always know the URL's. This one I haven't been able to verify:

 

Did U.S. SET GULF WAR OIL FIRES IN KUWAIT?

 

Remember those images in the U.S. media of huge fires covering the oil

fields of Kuwait during the first Gulf War? How U.S. rulers declared

that

Iraq

was responsible? Now Gulf War veterans are charging that these fires

were

set

by U.S. forces.

 

A press release from the American Gulf War Veterans Association (AGWVA)

says that, "For the past six years the AGWVA have received numerous

reports

from veterans stating that US forces were responsible for setting the

oil

well

fires at the end of the Gulf War....

 

"One veteran has now stepped forward and given a detailed account of

how

 

he

and others in special teams moved forward of the front (behind enemy

lines

ahead of US forces) and then set charges on the well heads. `We were

mustered

into the briefing tent at which point a gentleman whom I first had

thought

to

be an American began to brief us on the operation. I was concerned

because

he

was not wearing a US uniform and insignias.'

 

"The information provided over a series of meetings with this veteran

corroborates reports from other veterans who are totally unconnected

with

this

individual."

 

The AGWVA also reports that, "Of the nearly 700,000 participants in the

Persian Gulf war, over 279,000 have now come forward stating they are

sick

as

a result of their service in Desert Storm. They are not just sick, they

are

dying (Senate Report 103-900)." (For more information, see

Gulfwarvets.com

or

e-mail to Gulfwar@dam.net)

 

For nearly a decade the U.S. military denied there was any such illness

as "Gulf War Syndrome." Many of the cases were later traced to vaccines

administered to U.S. troops.

[Stormig]

http://www.observer.co.uk/international/st...,901180,00.html

 

US Considers Intervention in Colombia

 

Washington mulls tough response to kidnapping of CIA

'agents'

 

Martin McNamara in Caqueta, Colombia

Sunday February 23, 2003

The Observer

 

The United States is considering direct military

intervention in Colombia for the first time following

the murder of an American and the kidnapping of three

others, all suspected CIA agents.

 

The US embassy in Colombia has recommended Washington

make a 'major response' to the Revolutionary Armed

Forces of Colombia (Farc) rebels responsible, and

American officials have confirmed that military action

is being considered to recover the men from the dense

jungles of the southern province of Caqueta.

 

They were captured after their plane crashed into the

jungle suffering engine trouble. Despite the swift

arrival of the Colombian army, the rebels spirited

three survivors away after executing one American and

the Colombian pilot who are thought to have put up a

struggle.

 

Washington has refused to release any information

about the men, entrenching the belief that they were

CIA agents on a surveillance mission.

 

For the people of Caqueta, the prospect of a US

military incursion into the province is yet another

nightmare. In the past year, since the collapse of the

peace process, they have seen the suspension of local

government and are living under a form of martial law.

Scores of ordinary people have been tortured and

murdered by right-wing paramilitaries and they face a

constant campaign of bombing and kidnapping by the

Farc.

 

The murder of the first US government worker in

Colombia's bitter war has again focused attention on

Caqueta. This isolated province first hit the

headlines in 1999 when it became central to a truce

under which the Farc were given effective control of a

Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) the size of Switzerland.

 

San Vicente del Caguán became its unofficial capital

and the site for peace talks between the government

and the guerrillas, but now the threat of US action

hangs over the town, just a few kilometres from the

scene of the plane crash. A search for the kidnapped

men has been launched by troops, backed by US

helicopters and intelligence planes.

 

Sister Bernadette, a nurse who has worked here for 20

years, said: 'Farc ran everything. They were able to

train and recruit and build up their strength. That is

what the peace process achieved.'

 

The DMZ ended a year ago and thousands of troops

poured back into the region, but the Farc still

control much of Caqueta.

 

'In the jungle and the villages, this is still a

demilitarised zone,' said Father Gabriel, a local

priest. 'The Farc control everything and if we want to

do anything we go to them, not the military.'

 

The military confine themselves to San Vicente and the

main roads, but even so are only partly successful.

Two bombs went off near the town's central plaza last

month and kidnapping has become almost a mundane

activity.

 

Local guerrillas have perfected a technique they call

pesca milagrosa - miracle fishing. The name comes from

the biblical story of Jesus telling his apostles to

cast their nets on the water and how they emerged

bursting with fish. The guerrillas will stop a convoy

of cars and buses, and take hostage those they suspect

have rich friends or families.

 

There was a local administration and police force in

San Vicente, but when the DMZ ended, they all left -

or were murdered. The town hall is closed, the police

station was blown up and the area left without any

form of non-military government.

 

Then the paramilitaries turned up. 'They arrived in

town one night and the next day there were five bodies

in the Caguán river,' said Fr Gabriel. Funded by

ranchers and cocaine barons, the paramilitaries have

grown into a fearsome force in Colombia. And although

illegal, they have strong links to the military. Often

no one can be sure which side is responsible for

murders in Caqueta.

 

For anyone working with the community, the risk is

from both sides. The guerrillas murdered a colleague

of Sister Bernadette who was seen talking to the

military. She herself was stopped at an army roadblock

and her medical supplies confiscated. Every day for a

week she went to the local military commander's office

to demand their return but also visited the local Farc

commander to explain her trips, lest he decide she was

an informer.

 

A delegation from Amnesty International recorded 17

politically motivated murders, with 78 more noted.

 

Areas of the Caqueta jungle have been cleared for coca

growing and it is targeted by US-backed anti-cocaine

measures. Coca is grown by small farmers, but the crop

is the Farc's main source of income and they control

every aspect of production.

 

Locals complain the coca spraying destroys crops and

wildlife, poisons the land and causes illness. The US

has just increased its budget to the Colombian

government to fight the cocaine trade and bring peace

to the country.

 

'We'll believe it when the bodies stop floating down

the Caguán River,' said Fr Gabriel.

[Stormig]

The Trouble With Corporate Radio: The Day the Protest

Music Died

 

February 20, 2003

By BRENT STAPLES

 

Pop music played a crucial role in the national debate

over

the Vietnam War. By the late 1960's, radio stations

across

the country were crackling with blatantly political

songs

that became mainstream hits. After the National Guard

killed four antiwar demonstrators at Kent State

University

in Ohio in the spring of 1970, Crosby, Stills, Nash

and

Young recorded a song, simply titled "Ohio," about the

horror of the event, criticizing President Richard

Nixon by

name. The song was rushed onto the air while sentiment

was

still high, and became both an antiwar anthem and a

huge

moneymaker.

 

A comparable song about George W. Bush's rush to war

in

Iraq would have no chance at all today. There are

plenty of

angry people, many with prime music-buying

demographics.

But independent radio stations that once would have

played

edgy, political music have been gobbled up by

corporations

that control hundreds of stations and have no wish to

rock

the boat. Corporate ownership has changed what gets

played

- and who plays it. With a few exceptions, the disc

jockeys

who once existed to discover provocative new music

have

long since been put out to pasture. The new generation

operates from play lists dictated by Corporate Central

-

lists that some D.J.'s describe as "wallpaper music."

 

Recording artists were seen as hysterics when they

complained during the 1990's that radio was killing

popular

music by playing too little of it. But musicians have

turned out to be the canaries in the coal mine - the

first

group to be affected by a 1996 federal law that

allowed

corporations to gobble up hundreds of stations,

limiting

expression over airwaves that are merely licensed to

broadcasters but owned by the American public.

 

When a media giant swallows a station, it typically

fires

the staff and pipes in music along with something that

resembles news via satellite. To make the local public

think that things have remained the same, the voice

track

system sometimes includes references to local matters

sprinkled into the broadcast.

 

What my rock 'n' roll colleague William Safire

describes as

the "ruination of independent radio" started with

corporatizing in the 1980's but took off dramatically

when

the Telecommunications Act of 1996 increased the

number of

stations that one entity could own in a single market

and

permitted companies to buy up as many stations

nationally

as their deep pockets would allow.

 

The new rules were billed as an effort to increase

radio

diversity, but they appear to have had the opposite

effect.

Under the old rules, the top two owners had 115

stations

between them. Today, the top two own more than 1,400

stations. In many major markets, a few corporations

control

80 percent of the listenership or more.

 

Liberal Democrats are horrified by the legion of

conservative talk show hosts who dominate the

airwaves. But

the problem stretches across party lines. National

Journal

reported last month that Representative Mark Foley,

Republican of Florida, was finding it difficult to

reach

his constituents over the air since national radio

companies moved into his district, reducing the number

of

local stations from five to one. Senator Byron Dorgan,

Democrat of North Dakota, had a potential disaster in

his

district when a freight train carrying anhydrous

ammonia

derailed, releasing a deadly cloud over the city of

Minot.

When the emergency alert system failed, the police

called

the town radio stations, six of which are owned by the

corporate giant Clear Channel. According to news

accounts,

no one answered the phone at the stations for more

than an

hour and a half. Three hundred people were

hospitalized,

some partially blinded by the ammonia. Pets and

livestock

were killed.

 

The perils of consolidation can be seen clearly in the

music world. Different stations play formats labeled

"adult

contemporary," "active rock," "contemporary hit radio"

and

so on. But studies show that the formats are often

different in name only - and that as many as 50

percent of

the songs played in one format can be found in other

formats as well. The point of these sterile play lists

is

to continually repeat songs that challenge nothing and

no

one, blending in large blocks of commercials.

 

Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin has introduced a

bill

that would require close scrutiny of mergers that

could

potentially put the majority of the country's radio

stations in a single corporation's hands. Lawmakers

who

missed last month's Senate hearings on this issue

should

get hold of the testimony offered by the singer and

songwriter Don Henley, best known as a member of the

Eagles, the rock band.

 

Mr. Henley's Senate testimony recalled the

Congressional

payola hearings of 1959-60, which showed the public

how

disc jockeys were accepting bribes to spin records on

the

air. Now, Mr. Henley said, record companies must pay

large

sums to "independent promoters," who intercede with

radio

conglomerates to get songs on the air. Those fees, Mr.

Henley said in a recent telephone interview, sometimes

reach $400,000.

 

Which brings us back to the hypothetical pop song

attacking

George Bush. The odds against such a song reaching the

air

are steep from the outset, given a conservative

corporate

structure that controls thousands of stations. Record

executives who know the lay of land take the path of

least

resistance when deciding where to spend their

promotional

money. This flight to sameness and superficiality is

narrowing the range of what Americans hear on the

radio -

and killing popular music.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/20/opinion/...4363817e5a7bfaf

[Stormig]

Why Class Analysis Matters:

The Gulf War Twelve Years Later

 

By Mitchel Cohen

 

“We have before us the opportunity to forge for ourselves and for

future

 

generations a New World Order, a world where the rule of law, not the

law

of the jungle, governs the conduct of nations.”

- President George H.W. Bush, Sept. 11, 1990

 

On September 11th 1990, U.S. President George H.W. Bush, upholding

“democracy” and “peace,” declared his “New World Order” in a speech

before

the US Congress. He was soon rain thousands of tons of napalm, air-fuel

explosives, phosphorous bombs, cluster bombs and uranium-encased shells

upon Iraq, killing thousands, terrorizing that country. Seven years

later,

President Bill Clinton did George Bush one better -- he actually signed

a

top secret directive authorizing first use of nuclear weapons against

Iraq

“under certain circumstances.”

 

By the end of February, 1998, two Los Angeles-class submarines carrying

nuclear warheads atop Tomahawk missiles had arrived in the Gulf. Each

missile was encased in so-called “depleted” uranium. The non-nuclear

version of these weapons, also coated with depleted uranium, are now

being

used by the US in Afghanistan.

 

Depleted uranium had been used extensively in the Gulf war and in the

bombardment of Yugoslavia, irradiating food and water supplies and

poisoning the land for millenia. Childhood cancers have skyrocketed in

Iraq

and in Yugoslavia; depleted uranium is thought to be a contributing

factor

in the illnesses of tens of thousands of US soldiers who had handled or

become exposed to the material. The question then as well as now is

“Why

did the US government think all of this was, and remains, necessary?

What

strategic goals was actually trying to accomplish?"

 

What are we to make of George Bush's assertion that the war had

“nothing

to

do with oil”? As much as the U.S. wanted the Gulf states to line up

behind

Saudi Arabia as the industry's price-setter and steady prices at around

$26

a barrel, it did not need the violent, brutal bombardment to accomplish

that. Nor was the slaughter necessary to secure immediate profits for

the

oil companies, assert control over a larger share of the world's oil

resources, defend the hundreds of billions of dollars deposited in U.S.

banks by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, or test out new weapons systems --

all

 

rationales we are hearing again today from the peace movement, which is

trying to make sense of what is going on. From the long-term

perspective

of

capital, the war was not needed to achieve those results; these were

secondary plumbs, achievable through other measures.

 

The war was about two things, and we need to look at the current plans

to

bombard and occupy Iraq within this context:

 

- the war enabled the international banking and oil companies, Council

on

Foreign Relations, and Rockefeller-founded Trilateral Commission to

secure

new political as well as economic conditions for the ongoing production

of

oil (and other commodities). For the first time, the U.S. government,

acting as the "executive arm of the ruling class" -- succeeded in

forcing

all the severely divided factions and competing interests of the

capitalist

class into line behind a strategy for the globalization of capital: the

"New World Order";

 

and,

 

- the success of the New World Order depended upon crushing all

eruptions

of working class uprisings in the Gulf region, most visibly in Iran and

Iraq, keeping them from spreading to other countries, breaking up the

increasingly organized oil proletariat and replacing them with workers

from

even more desperate and unorganized areas of the world.

 

Fundamental to this, of course, is control over the oilfields. Please

note,

we are not talking here about going to war to generate huge immediate

profits for oil companies (even though that is one result. Individual

corporations will again profit handsomely, and we will all continue to

be

distracted from Enron, WorldCom, and the collapse of the U.S. economy).

 

On the one hand the longstanding contradictions within the U.S.

capitalist

class between trilateralist (world bankers, oil cartels), construction,

manufacturing, agribusiness, and aerospace/armaments/“defense”

industries

-- all with their own competing sets of economic and political

interests

--

had again propelled conflicting, even chaotic, government policies. And

on

the other, within Iraq -- as had been the case in Iran eleven years

earlier

-- leftist-led uprisings were threatening to destabilize the

centralized

 

nation-state itself, with the potential to launch a powerful communist

push

throughout the region. Crushing those uprisings became a priority for

the

US and a main reason for the U.S. government's promotion, funding and

arming of Iraq in its long war with Iran.

 

In 1978 and 1979 the Iranian revolution had bubbled up from the

grassroots

and ejected the Shah -- the main supporter of Israel in the region and

the

U.S. government's military strongman in the Arab and Western Asian

oil-producing world. One of the key features of the Iranian revolution

--

one not shown on American TV, which focused solely on the student

takeovers

in Iran's capital city, Teheran, and the taking of 52 hostages (1) --

was

the rebellion of the oil workers, some 80,000 strong.

 

With the involvement of two million people living in oil towns,

striking

 

workers shut down the massive Iranian petroleum industry. “The U.S.

engineered an attempt to get oil flowing again by staffing the fields

and

refineries with 10,000 naval cadets trained for this purpose. The

strikebreaking effort failed. The striking workers refused to send oil

to

Israel and South Africa. Yet through a strong and intricate network of

peoples' committees called Shura in Pharsi, oil products were

distributed

throughout Iran, though not to the Shah's military.” (2)

 

The Iranian oilworkers were irreplaceable in the dangerous and highly

technical operations of the oil system. They immediately coordinated

amongst themselves a national operation, using the organization and

communications technology of the industry itself.

 

Iranian society during the revolutionary period was democratically run

from

the grassroots by decentralized popular committees (Komitehs or Shuraá)

for

approximately two years. These Shura formed in late 1978 in all sectors

of

society: the schools, the military and media, the oil industry, among

the

rural Kurds and in the civil service as well as in local neighborhoods.

Garbage collection, bread baking and distribution, education and

publishing, munitions manufacture and international relations were some

of

the social activities that these radical democratic committees carried

out. (3)

 

The Ayatollah Khomeini’s aim in returning to Iraq after the upsurge

from

 

his exile in Paris, was to reassert the power of the bazaari, the

mullahs

and the national bourgeoisie in Iran -- the basis for his authority. In

this way, the situation in Iran 24 years ago is very similar to that in

Afghanistan under the Taliban. Even while declaring the United States

to

be

“the Great Satan,” the Islamic fundamentalist Khomeini crushed the

neighborhood and workers’ councils that were serving to democratize the

society as well as the oil industry (to the consternation of the oil

companies) by reactivating the Shah's SAVAK -- the savage secret police

that had been trained a generation earlier by Gen. H. Norman

Schwarzkopf's

father. To gain the upper hand over the Shura, Khomeini needed a means

for

galvanizing the country. This was accomplished by the war with

neighboring

Iraq which lasted for 8 long years, killing more than 1 million Iranian

and

Iraqi people.

 

From Khomeini's position, the war between Iran and Iraq served as a

means

to defeat an insurgent working class movement at home. It enabled

Khomeini

to concentrate the power of the State in the hands of ultra-religious

fanatics (an outcome welcomed by the U.S. government as the lesser of

two

evils, representing the longterm interests of the oilgarchy); and, from

Saddam Hussein's position, the war served as a means to reap the

material

benefits of doing the U.S.'s bidding in the region and, similarly, to

crush

rising working class movements in Iraq, particularly around Basra,

Nasria

and Hilah where, for decades, there had been strong Stalinist as well

as

 

council communist movements, and among the Kurds in the North. The

ruling

clique in Iraq used U.S. aid to consolidate the power of Iraq's fascist

state through the terror of Saddam's brownshirts -- the Republican

Guards.

(More about them shortly.)

 

How could the U.S. play off the various forces in the Middle East? When

should it befriend one sector, attack another? How could it maintain

the

 

Saudi rulers' allegiance as U.S. capital's primary ally in the region

along

with Israel? These have ever been the source of debate in Washington.

Here

we come to a main argument I am making: There is no monolithic U.S.

policy

that benefits all sectors of the ruling class equally. The alignment of

members of the U.S. President's cabinet with different sectors of

capital

helps explain the differences in approach and even outright policy

struggles between Baker and Cheney in 1990, or Haig, Shultz and

Weinberger

a decade earlier (4) -- and, for that matter, between Clinton/Gore and

Bush/Cheney in 2000.

 

Support for sanctions against Iraq and for the U.N. Security Council

resolutions had been a prime strategy of the big oil and banking

sector,

 

reflecting its own long range economic and political interests, and its

reliance upon military assistance to Israel. Military support for Saudi

Arabia, on the other hand, had long been a strategy of the aerospace

and

 

construction companies, such as Bechtel and Northrop, with enormous

projects in that country and billions of dollars at stake. In contrast

to

the first term of Reagan's presidency (in whose cabinet the Bechtel

corporation played an inordinately powerful and, except for Gen. Haig,

a

controlling role), all camps had strong presence in the first Bush

Administration. (After the Gulf war and still under George Bush’s

presidency, Bechtel was awarded multi-billion dollar contracts for the

reconstruction of Kuwait. Bush used the power of his office to

basically

 

cajole, coerce and bribe the different sectors of capital into getting

in

line behind his policy of the New World Oder/globalization of capital,

just

as his son is currently attempting to do with members of the Security

Council.) Bush's successful cooptation of the right-wing of capital,

which

had historically been hostile to the United Nations, and disciplining

the

entire capitalist class behind the dominant strategy of seeking U.S.

capital's expansion through U.N. mechanisms was quite an extraordinary

feat

of political manipulation with long term political consequences.

 

The Gulf war was the hammer need to accomplish that objective. The

alphabet

soup of UN structural adjustment programs, debt service payments,

enterprise zones, the IMF, World Bank, WTO, NAFTA, GATT, U.S. Agency

for

 

International Development and what today we call NGOs --

non-governmental

organizations, the so-called “progressive” arm of globalization -- are

the

resulting mechanisms through which the New World Order is implemented.

(5)

Today, we are seeing various sectoral tensions being played out at the

UN

Security Council. Whether the massive outpouring of global antiwar

sentiment has helped bring about a rupture in the New World Order

consensus

promulgated by George Bush, Sr. (which would be irony worthy of

Sophocles

(or, should we say, "Carlyle") and give new meaning to Oedipus Rex, so

to

speak, in which the son wrecks the neoliberal strategy of the father),

or

is only a slightly chaotic blip within that still hegemonic framework

remains to be seen. It is this concern that is occupying the various

global

strategists, as is evidenced by their slightly nuanced and grating

statements.

 

If the anti-globalization movement can more deeply influence the

direction

of the anti-war movement, we may be seeing the end of this period of

neoliberalism and the beginnings of mass movements for revolutionary

economic, ecological and social transformation, worldwide.

 

End Part One

 

NOTES

 

1. ABC's Nightline, with Ted Koppel, was born as a means of documenting

the

hostage crisis day by day.

 

2. Terisa Turner, “The 1991 Gulf War and Popular Struggles,” in Arise

Ye

 

Mighty People! Gender, Class & Race in Popular Struggles, Terisa Turner

and

Bryan Furguson, eds. Africa World Press, Inc., Trenton, NJ.

 

3. Turner, ibid., and Terisa Turner, “The politics of world resource

development in the 1990s,” International Oil Working Group, New York,

1990.

 

4. See, for example, Mitchel Cohen, “Class Wars: Haig, Israel & the

U.S.

 

Government,” in Red Balloon Newsletter, October 1981. Haig represented

the

strong pro-Israel position of the trilateralists; Shultz and

Weinberger,

 

who had been officers of the Bechtel Corporation, represented the

position

favoring arms to Saudi Arabia, which was strongly protested by Israel,

even

though they, too, did not take an anti-Israel line directly.

 

5. See Mitchel Cohen, “The L.A. Rebellion and the World Bank,” in The

Capitalist Infesto: What Is The Existential Vacuum ... & Does It Come

With

Attachments?, and also Mitchel Cohen, Haiti and Somalia: The

International

Trade in Toxic Waste for further development and case study

applications

of

NGOs in practice and the development of a new global division of labor

to

which the Gulf war was central.

 

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

Mitchel Cohen is editor of Green Politix, the national newspaper of the

Greens/Green Party USA. www.greenparty.org

 

Mitchel Cohen

2652 Cropsey Avenue

Brooklyn, NY 11214

(718) 449-0037

mitchelcohen@mindspring.com

www.greenparty.org

[Stormig]

Dead suspects can't tell you anything no more...

 

America admits suspects died in interrogations

Andrew Gumbel ([London] Independent)

7 Mar 03

 

American military officials acknowledged yesterday that two prisoners

captured in Afghanistan in December had been killed while under

interrogation at Bagram air base north of Kabul ? reviving concerns

that

the US is resorting to torture in its treatment of Taliban fighters and

suspected al-Qa'ida operatives.

 

A spokesman for the air base confirmed that the official cause of death

of

the two men was "homicide", contradicting earlier accounts that one had

died of a heart attack and the other from a pulmonary embolism.

 

The men's death certificates, made public earlier this week, showed

that

one captive, known only as Dilawar, 22, from the Khost region, died

from

"blunt force injuries to lower extremities complicating coronary artery

disease" while another captive, Mullah Habibullah, 30, suffered from

blood

clot in the lung that was exacerbated by a "blunt force injury".

 

US officials previously admitted using "stress and duress" on prisoners

including sleep deprivation, denial of medication for battle injuries,

forcing them to stand or kneel for hours on end with hoods on,

subjecting

them to loud noises and sudden flashes of light and engaging in

culturally

humiliating practices such as having them kicked by female officers.

 

While the US claims this still constitutes "humane" treatment, human

rights

groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have

denounced it as torture as defined by international treaty. The US has

also

come under heavy criticism for its reported policy of handing suspects

over

to countries such as Jordan, Egypt or Morocco, where torture techniques

are

an established part of the security apparatus. Legally, Human Rights

Watch

says, there is no distinction between using torture directly and

subcontracting it out.

 

Some American politicians have argued that torture could be justified

in

this case if it helped prevent terror attacks on US citizens. Jonathan

Turley, a prominent law professor at George Washington University,

countered that embracing torture would be "suicide for a nation once

viewed

as the very embodiment of human rights".

 

Torture is part of a long list of concerns about the Bush

administration's

respect for international law, after the extrajudicial killing of

al-Qa'ida

suspects by an unmanned drone in Yemen and the the indefinite detention

of

"enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a number of whom have

committed

or attempted to commit suicide.

 

President Bush appeared to encourage extra-judicial solutions in his

State

of the Union address in January when he talked of al-Qa'ida members

being

arrested or meeting "a different fate". "Let's put it this way," he

said in

a tone that appalled many, "they are no longer a problem to the United

States and our friends and allies."

[Stormig]

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?t...storyID=2346382

 

ElBaradei - "Proof" that Iraq sought uranium was fake

 

By Louis Charbonneau

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. nuclear agency has

shot down allegations that Iraq tried to revive its nuclear arms

programme and says fake documents back U.S. claims Baghdad tried to buy

uranium to make bombs.

 

In what some believe was his last update report to the U.N. Security

Council on weapons inspections in Iraq, International Atomic Energy

Agency Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei undermined Washington's

position just as it scrambles for support for a U.N. resolution

paving the way for war in Iraq.

 

"Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded ... that these

documents, which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium

transactions between Iraq and Niger, are in fact not authentic,"

ElBaradei told the U.N. Security Council on Friday.

 

"We have therefore concluded that these specific allegations are

unfounded," he said.

 

Britain and the United States have alleged that Iraq had tried to

revive an ambitious atomic weapons program that was neutralised

by the United Nations before inspectors left in December 1998.

 

The claim Iraq had attempted to import the uranium was vital to

the U.S. accusation, since it would not have needed the uranium

for anything other than a nuclear weapons programme.

 

"After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found

no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear

weapons programme in Iraq," he said.

 

To date, the IAEA's inspectors have carried out 218 inspections at 141

sites, he said.

 

THE TROUBLE WITH TUBES

 

ElBaradei said extensive investigations of high-strength aluminium

tubes Iraq attempted to purchase had confirmed that they were not

suitable for a uranium enrichment centrifuge programme, as the United

States had alleged.

 

In his speech to the council, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell

insisted that the IAEA should "keep the issue open" and said Iraq

was also "found shopping for these tubes" in Europe.

 

But ElBaradei said a team of international centrifuge manufacturing

experts believed Baghdad had told the truth about wanting them for

rockets.

 

"Extensive field investigation and document analysis have failed

to uncover any evidence that Iraq intended to use these 81mm tubes

for any project other than the reverse engineering of rockets," he

said.

 

Knocking down another U.S. allegation, ElBaradei said IAEA experts

had concluded that none of Iraq's declared high- strength magnets

could be used directly to enrich uranium.

 

But, ElBaradei added: "Iraq possesses the expertise to manufacture

high-strength permanent magnets suitable for use in enrichment

centrifuges."

 

For this reason, he said the IAEA would keep an eye out for equipment

and materials that could be used to enrich uranium.

 

Baghdad has consistently denied it had attempted to revive its nuclear

weapons program.

 

Echoing similar comments from chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix,

the top nuclear inspector concluded his speech by saying Iraq had

become more cooperative in recent weeks.

 

"I do hope that Iraq will continue to expand the scope and accelerate

the pace of its cooperation," ElBaradei said.

[Stormig]

Leaked Report Says German and US Firms Supplied Arms to Saddam

Baghdad's uncensored report to UN names Western companies alleged to have developed its weapons of mass destruction

 

by Tony Paterson in Berlin

 

Iraq's 11,000-page report to the UN Security Council lists 150 foreign companies, including some from America, Britain, Germany and France, that supported Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction program, a German newspaper said yesterday.

 

Berlin's left-wing Die Tageszeitung newspaper said it had seen a copy of the original Iraqi dossier which was vetted for sensitive information by US officials before being handed to the five permanent Security Council members two weeks ago. An edited version was passed to the remaining 10 members of the Security Council last night.

 

British officials said the list of companies appeared to be accurate. Eighty German firms and 24 US companies are reported to have supplied Iraq with equipment and know-how for its weapons programs from 1975 onwards and in some cases support for Baghdad's conventional arms program had continued until last year.

 

It is not known who leaked the report, but it could have come from Iraq. Baghdad is keen to embarrass the US and its allies by showing the close involvement of US, German, British and French firms in helping Iraq develop its weapons of mass destruction when the country was a bulwark against the much feared spread of Iranian revolutionary fervor to the Arab world.

 

The list contained the names of long-established German firms such as Siemens as well as US multinationals. With government approval, Siemens exported machines used to eliminate kidney stones which have a "dual use" high precision switch used to detonate nuclear bombs. Ten French companies were also named along with a number of Swiss and Chinese firms. The newspaper said a number of British companies were cited, but did not name them.

 

"From about 1975 onwards, these companies are shown to have supplied entire complexes, building elements, basic materials and technical know-how for Saddam Hussein's program to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction," the newspaper said. "They also supplied rockets and complete conventional weapons systems," it added.

 

The five permanent members of the Security Council – the United States, Britain, Russia, France and China – have repeatedly opposed revealing the extent of foreign companies' involvement, although a mass of relevant information was collected by UN weapons inspectors who visited the country between 1991 and 1998. The UN claims that publishing the extent of the companies' involvement in Iraq would jeopardize necessary co-operation with such firms.

 

German involvement outstripped that of all the other countries put together, the paper said. During the period to 1991, the German authorities permitted weapons cooperation with Iraq and in some cases "actively encouraged" it, according to the newspaper which cited German assistance allegedly given to Iraq for the development of poison gas used in the 1988 massacre of Kurds in northern Iraq. It said that after the massacre America reduced its military cooperation with Iraq but German firms continued their activities until the Gulf War.

 

Die Tageszeitung quoted sources close to the US Vice President, Dick Cheney, as saying the Bush administration was hoping to prove a German company was continuing to co-operate with the Iraqi regime over the supply of equipment allegedly useful in the construction of weapons of mass destruction.

 

American weapons experts have recently voiced concern that the German Government has permitted Siemens to sell Baghdad at least eight sophisticated medical machines which contain devices that are vital for nuclear weapons. The machines, known as "lithotripters", use ultrasound to destroy kidney stones in patients. However, each machine contains an electronic switch that can be used as a detonator in an atomic bomb, according to US experts. Iraq was reported to have requested an extra 120 switches as "spare parts" during the initial transaction.

 

The delivery of the machines was approved by the European Commission and the UN because sanctions against Iraq do not apply to medical equipment. Siemens and the German Government have insisted that the machines, which are being used in northern Iraq under a World Health Organization program, cannot be used to make nuclear weapons.

 

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1218-06.htm

[Stormig]

Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. [TACITUS, Agricola xxx]

They make a desert and call it peace.

[Stormig]

In Torture We Trust?

by Eyal Press

 

If patriotism has to precipitate us into dishonour, if there is no precipice of inhumanity over which nations and men will not throw themselves, then, why in fact do we go to so much trouble to become, or to remain, human? --Jean-Paul Sartre

 

Print this article

E-mail this article

Write to the editors

 

Research support was provided by the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute.

he recent capture of Al Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is the latest indication that the taboo on torture has been broken. In the days after Mohammed's arrest, an unnamed official told the Wall Street Journal that US interrogators may authorize "a little bit of smacky-face" while questioning captives in the war on terrorism. Others proposed that the United States ship Mohammed off to a country where laxer rules apply. "There's a reason why [Mohammed] isn't going to be near a place where he has Miranda rights or the equivalent," a senior federal law enforcer told the Journal. "You go to some other country that'll let us pistol-whip this guy."

 

Asked about this by CNN's Wolf Blitzer, Senator Jay Rockefeller IV, a Democrat from West Virginia and vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, replied, "I wouldn't take anything off the table where he is concerned, because this is the man who has killed hundreds and hundreds of Americans over the last ten years." (An aide to Rockefeller subsequently insisted that the Senator did not condone turning Mohammed over to a regime that tortures.) In fact, sending US captives to abusive allies, and other policies that potentially implicate America in torture, have been in use for months.

 

On December 26 of last year, the Washington Post published a front-page story detailing allegations of torture and inhumane treatment involving thousands of suspects apprehended since the September 11 terrorist attacks. Al Qaeda captives held at overseas CIA interrogation centers, which are completely off-limits to reporters, lawyers and outside agencies, are routinely "softened up"--that is, beaten--by US Army Special Forces before interrogation, as well as thrown against walls, hooded, deprived of sleep, bombarded with light and bound in painful positions with duct tape. "If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," one official said to the Post of these methods, which at the very least constitute cruel and inhumane treatment and may rise to the level of "severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental," the benchmark of torture.

 

The same article reported that approximately 100 suspects have been transferred to US allies, including Saudi Arabia and Morocco, whose brutal torture methods have been amply documented in the State Department's own annual human rights reports. "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them," one official told the Post. "We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them." Many captives have been sent to Egypt, where, according to the State Department, suspects are routinely "stripped and blindfolded; suspended from a ceiling or doorframe with feet just touching the floor; beaten with fists, whips, metal rods, or other objects; subjected to electric shocks." In at least one case, a suspect was sent to Syria, where, the State Department says, torture methods include "pulling out fingernails; forcing objects into the rectum...using a chair that bends backwards to asphyxiate the victim or fracture the spine." A story in Newsday published just after Mohammed's arrest quoted a former CIA official who, describing a detainee transferred from Guantánamo Bay to Egypt, said, "They promptly tore his fingernails out and he started telling things."

 

Just as pundits debated Mohammed's possible transfer, evidence emerged that remaining in US custody might not be any safer : Death certificates released for two Al Qaeda suspects who died while in US custody at the Bagram base in Afghanistan showed that both were killed by "blunt force injuries." Other detainees told of being hung from the ceiling by chains.

 

The Bush Administration insists that the United States has not violated the UN Convention Against Torture, which the Senate ratified in 1994. But the cascade of recent revelations has left human rights groups understandably alarmed. Shortly after the Washington Post article appeared, a coalition of organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, fired off a letter to Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz calling upon the Bush Administration to unequivocally denounce torture and clarify that the United States will "neither seek nor rely upon intelligence obtained" through such practices. But few have echoed their call. "There's been a painful silence about this," says Human Rights Watch executive director Ken Roth. "I haven't heard anyone in Congress call for hearings or even speak out publicly." The silence extends to the media, where, until Mohammed's capture, no follow-up investigations and few editorials had appeared--not even in the New York Times.

 

The absence of debate may simply reflect a preoccupation with Iraq, but it may also signal that in these jittery times, many people see torture as justified. In the aftermath of the World Trade Center attack, numerous commentators did suggest that the absolute prohibition on torture should be reconsidered. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz famously proposed allowing US judges to issue "torture warrants" to prevent potentially catastrophic terrorist attacks. Writing in The New Republic last fall, Richard Posner, a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, expressed reservations about Dershowitz's proposal but argued that "if the stakes are high enough, torture is permissible. No one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility."

 

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030331&s=press

[Stormig]

Pentagon seeks freedom to pollute land, air and sea

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

13 March 2003

 

The Pentagon is quietly seeking exemptions from some of America's main environmental laws, which would give the military free rein to dump spent munitions, pollute the air and poison endangered species at its bases without risk of liability for any damage.

 

The proposal, slipped into the fine print of the 2004 military budget last week, is enraging environmentalists and some senior figures on Capitol Hill, who say the Pentagon is taking shameless advantage of the 11 September attacks and the looming war against Iraq to wriggle out of its responsibilities to public health and the country's natural heritage.

 

"There is no justification whatsoever for the exemptions they are seeking. They do not even present examples of why they are seeking this exemption," John Walke, a clean air specialist with the National Resources Defence Council, said.

 

Among the laws the military is seeking to circumvent are the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, important pieces of legislation governing the clean-up of environmental disasters and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Navy sonars have been blamed for the deaths of whales found washed up on beaches.

 

The Pentagon argues that it needs the exemptions because environmental laws get in the way of training troops. That assessment is contradicted by a recent report from Congress's General Accounting Office, which saw no negative impact from environmental statutes on military readiness.

 

Environmentalists point out that the White House already has the authority to grant case-by-case exemptions where national security might be at stake – something that has rarely happened. They also cite last year's Pentagon budget report estimating the military's liability for environmental degradation at about $28bn (£17bn). "This is not about military readiness," said Brock Evans, a former marine now with the Endangered Species Coalition. "There are alternatives to exempting themselves from environmental laws."

 

The Pentagon made a similar exemption proposal last year, only to see it shot down by the Senate, controlled by Democrats at the time.

 

The move appears to be controversial even within the Bush administration. Christine Todd Whitman, the White House's top environmental official, told a Senate committee recently: "I don't believe that there is a training mission anywhere in the country that is being held up or not taking place because of environmental protection regulation." And John Ashcroft, the ultra-conservative Attorney General, said protecting the environment was an important element of national security. "These laws do more than just protect the health and safety of our citizens," he said. "Compliance with and enforcement of these laws makes a real difference in our level of national preparedness."

 

The issue will be discussed today by two congressional subcommittees on armed services readiness. One leading Democratic congressman, John Dingell of Michigan, said the military had been trying for years to "get out from under" environmental laws. "But using the threat of 9/11 and al-Qa'ida to get unprecedented environmental immunity is despicable."

 

Pollution from the military has provoked regular environmental scandals – from rocket fuel contaminating drinking water to reports of cancer clusters and other illnesses possibly caused by jet fuel emissions or pipelines carrying heavy-duty fuel beneath houses.

 

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americ...sp?story=386524

[Sip]

Very interesting... I wonder how the Taliban would treat American captured prisoners. Now two of those bastards die and all of a sudden all these sissy-poos are all outraged at this "shocking" behavior!!!

 

Well, too bad ... open your eyes and realize we ain't going to put these a-holes in 5-star hotels, serve them champagne, and wipe their behinds with scented t.p.

[Stormig]

Plagiarism, forgeries... Just ask!

 

Fake Iraq documents 'embarrassing' for U.S.

From David Ensor

CNN Washington Bureau

Friday, March 14, 2003 Posted: 10:43 PM EST (0343 GMT)

 

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Intelligence documents that U.S. and British governments said were strong evidence that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons have been dismissed as forgeries by U.N. weapons inspectors.

 

The documents, given to International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, indicated that Iraq might have tried to buy 500 tons of uranium from Niger, but the agency said they were "obvious" fakes.

 

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to the documents directly in his presentation to the U.N. Security Council outlining the Bush administration's case against Iraq.

 

"I'm sure the FBI and CIA must be mortified by this because it is extremely embarrassing to them," former CIA official Ray Close said.

 

Responding to questions about the documents from lawmakers, Powell said, "It was provided in good faith to the inspectors and our agency received it in good faith, not participating ... in any way in any falsification activities."

 

"It was the information that we had. We provided it. If that information is inaccurate, fine," Powell said on NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday.

 

"We don't believe that all the issues surrounding nuclear weapons have been resolved [in Iraq]," he said.

 

How were forgeries missed?

But the discovery raises questions such as why the apparent forgeries were given to inspectors and why U.S. and British intelligence agents did not recognize that they were not authentic.

 

Sources said that one of the documents was a letter discussing the uranium deal supposedly signed by Niger President Tandja Mamadou. The sources described the signature as "childlike" and said that it clearly was not Mamadou's.

 

Another, written on paper from a 1980s military government in Niger, bears the date of October 2000 and the signature of a man who by then had not been foreign minister of Niger in 14 years, sources said.

 

"The IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts that these documents -- which formed the basis for the reports of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger -- are not in fact authentic," ElBaradei said in his March 7 presentation to the U.N. Security Council.

 

Close said the CIA should have known better.

 

"They have tremendously sophisticated and experienced people in their technical services division, who wouldn't allow a forgery like this to get by," Close said. "I mean it's just mystifying to me. I can't understand it."

 

A U.S. intelligence official said that the documents were passed on to the International Atomic Energy Agency within days of being received with the comment, " 'We don't know the provenance of this information, but here it is.' "

 

If a mistake was made, a U.S. official suggested, it was more likely due to incompetence not malice.

 

"That's a convenient explanation, but it doesn't satisfy me," Close said. "Incompetence I have not seen in those agencies. I've seen plenty of malice, but I've never seen incompetence."

 

Who made the forgeries?

But the question remains -- who is responsible for the apparent forgeries?

 

Experts said the suspects include the intelligence services of Iraq's neighbors, other pro-war nations, Iraqi opposition groups or simply con men.

 

Most rule out the United States, Great Britain or Israel because they said those countries' intelligence services would have been able to make much more convincing forgeries if they had chosen to do so.

 

President Bush even highlighted the documents in his State of the Union address on January 28.

 

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa," Bush said.

 

U.S. officials said that the assertion by the president and British government was also based on additional evidence of Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from another African country. But officials would not say which nation and a knowledgable U.S. official said that there was not much to that evidence either.

[Stormig]

But of course. After all, the U.S. belongs in the civilized West, leading the world in human rights, Taliban hardly being people (or even humans) to compare yourself with.

[Stormig]

Plagiarism, [forgeries and] lies. Interesting bits of information:

 

The Disinformation Age:

How George W. Bush and Saint Colin of Powell are lying America into an unnecessary war — and what honest journalists can do about it

 

TBTM Commentary by Dennis Hans

 

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking January 19 on ABC’s Sunday morning political show “This Week,” offered the media splendid advice on how they should handle in their broadcasts and articles a leader who lies:

 

“Well, first, Saddam Hussein is a liar. He lies every single day. . . . He is still claiming that he won the war. His people are being told every day that they won. It was a great victory in 1991 when he was thrown out of Kuwait and chased back to Baghdad. Now, it seems to me that almost every time you quote something from him, you should preface it by saying ‘here’s a man who has lied all the time and consistently’”

(http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2003/t01192003_t19sdabc.html).

 

Actually, that’s no longer necessary with Saddam. Nothing he says has been taken at face value since the 1980s, that golden decade when he was committing his worst human rights abuses with the blessing and support of Saint Colin of Powell and presidents Reagan and Bush — not to mention Reagan’s special emissary to Baghdad, a chap named Donald Rumsfeld.

 

There is a lying leader, a bit closer to home, to whom our news media should apply Rummy’s good advice. Not only does the leader lie, but so too do his top aides. And the news media, with rare exceptions, routinely pass along their lies as fact. The result is that the people of America are out of touch with the people of the world. Thus we’re far more willing than any other populace to launch an unprovoked attack

on Iraq. Whereas the German and French people — and the populations ruled by governments siding with Uncle Sam — are reasonably well-informed and overwhelmingly opposed, Americans are reasonably well-disinformed.

 

If Brokaw, Rather, Jennings and Lehrer have an ounce of integrity, they’ll apply Rummy’s remedy to the pronouncements on Iraq by George W. Bush and his top aides. I recommend this pre-interview and -soundbite preface:

 

“Here is a president [secretary of defense, secretary of state, national security adviser] who, when it comes to Iraq, repeatedly lies, exaggerates, misrepresents, deletes crucial context, or states actual facts in a manner cleverly designed to leave a false impression. Viewer beware.”

 

How the media enable and enhance White House deceit

 

For an administration headed by a purported plain-spoken straight shooter — a Texan who will look you in the eye and tell it like it is — it sure has mastered an awful lot of techniques of deceit.

 

The techniques of deceit I describe below are simple and transparent. It requires but half a brain and an ounce of courage to expose them. We should praise the too-few exposers and ridicule and badger the countless facilitators of flim-flam. We should single out the latter by name and demand they clean up their act or get out of the profession.

 

Not being privy to the brains of individual journalists, I can’t say why any particular one behaves as he or she does. Clearly, many factors, both institutional and personal, help to explain why Bob Woodward, Wolf Blitzer and John McWethy are war-team toadies while Dana Millbank and Glenn Kessler are solid reporters. I don’t know why columnists Nicholas Kristof and Richard Cohen continue to believe that Bush is an honest man, or why Paul Krugman has done more than all of the network and cable

“news” operations combined to expose the president as a brazen serial liar. I do know, however, that the current ratio, which I estimate at 100 gullible Woodwards for every competent Krugman, is disastrous for democracy.

 

What I can explain are five media tendencies that “enable” administration lying and enhance its effectiveness:

 

• Bestowing unwarranted credibility. When you routinely present a liar as a truth-teller, you become that liar’s accomplice. Viewers — particularly those under the ridiculous impression that network anchors are feisty, fiercely independent and maybe even left-leaning — will place greater credence in an unchallenged lie than a challenged one.

 

• Demonstrating real or feigned gullibility. The first indicates journalistic incompetence, the second journalistic corruption. Either should be a firing offense, but in our twisted media world it’s a ticket to the top. Self-respecting “news” organizations don’t retain, let alone promote, people such as Bob Woodward and Ted Koppel, or any of the Rumsfeld groupies “covering” the Pentagon.

 

• Failure to keep a lying score. A number of administration lies have been exposed, though the exposure is brief and often comes weeks after the lie has racked up millions of “frequent liar miles.” A reputable editor, publisher, anchor or producer would be troubled by this and would rectify the situation by regularly publishing or airing a running tally of administration lies.

 

• Failure to impose a penalty for lying. Why does Bush systematically lie? Because the lies help him to win support for his policies — on economic and other issues as well as Iraq — and the media impose no penalties on those rare occasions they belatedly catch him. Imagine how much robbery we’d have if the only “penalty” for getting caught was a brief mention you were caught. Just as Bush can keep telling the lie, you get to keep the TV or SUV you stole. Not much of a “deterrant.”

 

• No institutional memory BY DESIGN. In a healthy media environment, experts on the patterns, techniques and history of foreign-policy disinformation campaigns would be valued assets. In our present media environment, such people are shunned and staffers are discouraged from developing their own expertise. TV can hire scores of generals to provide expert analysis, but they won’t hire experienced disinformation

exposers Robert Parry, Peter Kornbluh, Norman Solomon, Edward Herman or Noam Chomsky.

 

The two-faced Washington Post

 

Bush is a con man who directs his cons at the very people most inclined to trust him: ordinary Americans who’ve been raised and taught by patriotic parents to put their faith and trust in the president of the United States. And here’s the ugliest secret of all: His most bullish media boosters know it!

 

I speak of the jingoistic, pro-war and exceedingly creepy editorial board of the Washington Post. Commenting on the “misleading” numbers Bush uses to sell to regular folk a tax-cut designed for the rich, the Post editorialized recently, “Mr. Bush must know how phony his ‘averages’ are. Any time a salesman has to resort to such deceptive tactics, the customer ought to be wary about what is being sold”

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38110-2003Feb20?language=printer).

 

An unsigned editorial represents the collective wisdom of the men and women on the editorial board. It is not the view of a “rogue editorialist” shooting off his mouth. The Post’s editorial braintrust KNOWS that Bush is a grifter.

 

Non-booster Krugman of the New York Times goes the Post one better, telling Terri Gross, the host of NPR’s “Fresh Air,” that the Bush administration’s “level of irresponsibility and dishonesty is unprecedented” (WMNF-FM, Tampa, Feb. 26).

 

More and more Americans are beginning to see just how crooked our straight-shooting president is. To further this awareness, and to caution citizens inclined to follow him into war, I review below 23 “techniques of deceit” of Bush and his foreign-policy team. Some of these techniques I address at greater length in “Lying Us Into War” (http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0302/S00061.htm).

 

I’ll start with Powell’s techniques before moving on to Bush.

 

Powell and Bush’s “techniques of deceit”

 

1) Telling with a straight face the “Mother of All Lies,” so as to lend credence to a bunch of small ones:

 

“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” That’s what Colin Powell told the U.N., in the course of his now-discredited presentation of bogus tales based on discredited defectors, tortured captives, photos and tape recordings that proved little or nothing, wild speculation, a

“fine” British dossier built on plagiarized essays with 12-year-old “revelations,” and so on.

 

I’ll cite a few specifics below. Readers interested for a damning dissection of each of Powell’s 44 claims can read this analysis (http://middleeastreference.org.uk/powell030205.html) by Dr. Glen Rangwala of Cambridge University, England’s leading expert on U.S. and U.K. claims about Iraq’s WMD programs.

 

2) Bait and switch:

 

As Rangwala noted in his initial analysis (http://www.traprockpeace.org/firstresponse.html), posted the day after Powell spoke,

 

“[Powell] makes strong claims about Iraq's retention and development of non-conventional weapons, but the claims that he provides substantive evidence for are either tangential or the evidence is ambiguous. An example would be how Powell claimed: ‘We know that Saddam's son, Qusay, ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from Saddam's numerous palace complexes ... We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities. . . .’

 

“However, instead of providing proof of any of those claims, Powell instead produced photos of al-Taji ammunition storage facility that shows a small shed and a truck adjacent to the bunker. Powell claimed that these are ‘a signature item’ for chemical bunkers. This seems on the face of it to be a wholly implausible claim: a picture of a truck and a shed by themselves reveal nothing about the contents of the adjacent bunker.

 

“In summary, Powell didn't provide evidence for the stronger claims that he made, instead displaying a satellite photo that reveals very little. This would indicate that the evidence for the stronger claims is either non-existent or contentious.”

 

3) Putting incriminating words in Iraqi mouths that you — or at least your State Department — know to be false:

 

In “Powell's U.N. report apparently contains false information” in the Feb. 24 Sarasota Herald Tribune (http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20030224&

Category=COLUMNIST13&ArtNo=302240368&SectionCat=&Template=printart),

Gilbert Cranberg, former editorial page editor of the Des Moines Register and George H. Gallup Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa, notes the following (I quote directly from the author):

 

He [Powell] also played the tapes, in Arabic, of two intercepted conversations, which the State Department translated. Powell referenced the conversations and commented on them.

 

In the first cited conversation, between two Iraqi military officers discussing how to conceal from U.N. inspectors a certain "modified vehicle," Powell's account of the conversation squared with the State Department's translation. Powell's version of the second conversation, however, departed significantly from it.

 

This conversation, about possibly forbidden ammunition, was reported by Powell to be between Republican Guard headquarters and an officer in the field. When Powell referred to this conversation, he quoted one of the parties as ostensibly saying, "And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there."

 

The State Department's transcript of the actual conversation makes it evident that Powell had embellished the quote to make it appear much more incriminating. Instead of being a directive to "clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas and the abandoned areas," as Powell claimed, the transcript shows the message from headquarters was merely "to INSPECT [emphasis added by Cranberg] the scrap areas and the abandoned areas." The damaging admonition that Powell said he quoted, "Make sure there is nothing there" is not in the transcript and appears to be an invention.

 

Asked to explain the discrepancy, the State Department's press and public affairs offices said I should study Powell's presentation posted on the department's Web site. Instead of clarifying or explaining the discrepancy, the posted material simply confirmed the disparity. [end of quoted excerpt]

 

Cranberg, after pointing out other problems with Powell’s so-called evidence, observed that “columnists at The New York Times and The Washington Post accepted everything Powell said without a smidgen of skepticism, calling it a ‘masterful indictment’ (James Hoagland) ‘that would convince any jury’ (William Safire).”

 

4) Exploiting an undeserved reputation for integrity to get unsuspecting people to accept flimsy evidence as fact — based on your say-so: Despite Powell’s boast, most of his “evidence” was reed-thin. For viewers who noticed that, “trust” came into play in a big way. Listen to Richard Cohen, perhaps the most gullible of the Washington Post’s lame, tiny contingent of real and fake liberals:

 

“The clincher, as it had to be, was not a single satellite photo or the intercept of one Iraqi official talking to another. And it was not, as it never could be, the assertion that some spy or Iraqi deserter had made this or that charge — because, of course, who can prove any of that? It was the totality of the material and the fact that Powell

himself had presented it. In this case, the messenger may have been more important than the message.” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32571-2003Feb5?language=printer)

 

A week later, as Powell’s “evidence” continued to unravel, the same gullible columnist acknowledged the unraveling but still couldn’t come to grips with the fundamental dishonesty of his hero and the president. Cohen addresses Powell directly:

 

“Sir, in his kiss-and-not-tell book, David Frum, the former White House speechwriter, tells us about George W. Bush’s insistence on honesty — on refraining from even politically acceptable exaggeration. I accept what he has to say. Yet it’s apparent that when it comes to making the case for war with Iraq, both Bush and his aides have tickled the facts so that everything proves their case. . . . I sleep better knowing that

you are in this administration — making policy, I hope, and not propaganda.”

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A397-2003Feb12?language=printer).

 

Bush’s “insistence on honesty”? Powell “making policy, . . . not propaganda”? Welcome to the fairy tale world of a respected Washington Post pundit.

 

5) Withholding the key fact that destroys the moral underpinning of an argument.

 

Powell condemned Saddam’s “use of mustard and nerve gas against the Kurds in 1988” that killed “Five thousand men, women and children.” True, but he did so with the blessing at the time of many Reaganites who now serve Bush — including Powell. In 1988, “Secretary of State Colin Powell was then the national security adviser who orchestrated Ronald Reagan’s decision to give Hussein a pass for gassing the Kurds,” says former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith in the Boston Globe (http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2002/1215/coverstory_entire.htm).

 

6) Trumpeting the testimony of defectors who you know or highly suspect aren’t credible:

 

According to the recent Newsweek story “Spies, Lies & Iraq,” (http://www.msnbc.com/news/867733.asp?0cv=CB20) “Iraqi defectors who offer themselves to the CIA are put through strenuous interrogations and lie-detector tests. The credible ones are given new identities and homes in America or Germany. The rejects are cast loose to fend for themselves. Some of them are nonetheless embraced by the [iraqi National Congress] — and, according to CIA officials, recycled to the more sympathetic (and more credulous) hawks in the Pentagon. Their stories are then worked over by Wolfowitz’s special intelligence unit—and passed on to the White House. The CIA, in turn, is asked then to rule on the credibility of information provided by defectors the agency has already deemed to be incredible. . . . Now, unsurprisingly, the CIA has little use for almost any intelligence emanating from the Kurds. The agency has acronyms for various types of intelligence, like HUMINT and ELINT (for electronic intelligence). At Langley, intelligence that is junk is jokingly called KURDINT.”

Powell cynically used KURDINT and other intelligence “junk” for his U.N. “facts” and “conclusions.”

 

7) Exploiting the fact that the U.N., unlike the U.S. military you served for most of your life, doesn’t have a Code forbidding lying: Activist Jimmy Walter (walden3.org), who has taken out full-page “Powell Lied?” ads in the New York Times and other publications, reminds Powell what could have befallen him if he had been an active-duty general when he addressed the U.N. Walter cites Section 907, Article 107 of the

Uniform Code of Military Justice, which addresses “False Statements”: “Any person subject to this chapter who, with intent to deceive, signs any false record, return, regulation, order, or other official document, knowing it to be false, or makes any other false official statement knowing it to be false, shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

 

It’s a good thing Powell is retired. But what about his boss, Commander-in-Chief Bush? Is the man who gives orders to the generals free to lie? Is he as immune from military justice as he appears to be from media justice? We now turn to Bush’s techniques, noting that Powell used some of these as well in his U.N. presentation.

 

8) Generalized “certitude”:

 

Bush confidentally asserts that the al Samoud2 missiles, recently ruled by Hans Blix to violate limitations on the distance that Iraqi missiles are allowed to fly, are merely the “tip of the iceberg” of Iraqi’s illegal arsenal. How does he KNOW this? The charitable answer is he doesn’t.

 

Even Hans Blix doesn’t “know” what, if anything, remains of Iraq’s WMD. As Fairness and Accuracy in Media (http://www.fair.org/press-releases/iraq-weapons.html) reports, “while Blix said he could not certify [to the U.N.] that all of the proscribed materials Iraq once possessed had been destroyed, neither did he find evidence that any remain. In private, some inspectors do not rule out the possibility that Iraq truly is free of banned weapons [this was prior to Blix’s ruling on the al Samouds]: ‘We haven't found an iota of concealed material yet,’ one unnamed UNMOVIC official told Los Angeles Times Baghdad correspondent Sergei Loiko (12/31/02), who added: ‘The inspector said his colleagues think it possible that Iraq really has eliminated its banned materials.’”

 

FAIR also cites this analyis of Rolf Ekeus, who headed the UNSCOM inspections from 1992 to 1997: “I would say that we felt that in all areas we have eliminated Iraq's capabilities fundamentally,” he told a May 2000 Harvard seminar (AP, 8/16/00), adding that “there are some question marks left.”

 

Unless Bush is withholding evidence of Iraqi WMD — evidence that 1441 requires him to provide to inspectors — then he couldn’t know more than Blix. If Bush is in violation of 1441, what would be the appropriate “serious consequences”?

 

When Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei address the U.N., it’s clear from the tone and substance of their reports that they are honest experts who use words to inform, not to mislead. Being real experts, they’re not ashamed to acknowledge when they can’t make a definitive judgment about a particular matter. When Bush and Powell address the U.N. or the American people, they do so not as honest experts but as shady

nonexperts. They pretend to know all, and they use words not to inform but to deceive.

 

Bush’s certitude is contagious and has infected much of the mass media. My local paper, the putrid St. Petersburg Times, editorialized Feb. 26 that “Bush is correct” in his “iceberg” declaration. Readers will have to trust me on this one, but I GUARANTEE that no one on the SPT editorial board, headed by the dimwitted, uncurious and contemptible Philip Gailey, has a clue as to what remains of Iraqi WMD capabilities.

 

9) Specific “certitude” — Stating as fact what are allegations, often dubious or subsequently disproved ones.

 

WMD labs in remote Kurdistan (disproven), mobile WMD labs (unproven, even though inspectors have been searching for years and some are skeptical of the practicality or existence of such labs) — these are just two of many dubious or false charges presented as fact by the Bush team. See Rangwala, my “Lying Us Into War,” and the analyses of the Institute for Public Accuracy at www.accuracy.org for dozens of examples; here I’ll address one.

 

Bush boldly declares that “From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.”

 

What we “know” is that defectors make this unproven claim. We don’t know if they were paid or coached to make the claim, or volunteered it on their own. Rangwala (http://www.traprockpeace.org/firstresponse.html) notes that one defector made no mention of the labs in his first press conferences. It was several months later, after “debriefings” by the U.S. and the Iraqi National Congress, that he started talking about mobile labs. Hans Blix told the London Guardian (http://truthout.org/docs_02/020603A.htm) he has seen no evidence that these mobile labs exist. Acting on tips from the U.S. about labs disguised as food-testing trucks, he investigated.

 

“Two food-testing trucks have been inspected and nothing has been found,” he said. Those mobile labs, a propaganga theme pushed hard by the administration because it supports the theme that inspections can never work: A former senior UNSCOM inspector told the Los Angeles Times last September that his inspection teams searched for the labs from 1993 to 1998. “I launched raid after raid,” he said. “We intercepted their radio traffic. We ran roadblocks. We never found anything. It was just

speculation.” (http://www.fourthfreedom.org/php/print.php?hinc=dossier_report.hinc)

 

Blix, the cautious and honest expert, doesn’t rule out the possiblity that mobile labs exist. But it is absurd for Bush to assert this as an established fact — and the media to allow him to get away with it.

 

10) Delegated lying/Team lying.

 

Using disinformation “affiliates,” such as Richard Perle, Ken Adelman and former Clinton administration CIA director James Woolsey, to push damning, highly effective lies for which there is no credible evidence, such as the Saddam-9-11 connection (http://slate.msn.com/id/2070410/).

 

This way, when the story loses steam and credibility, the president and his top advisers don’t wind up with egg on their faces. The president will have gained considerable public support for an Iraq attack in the months the story percolates, and, quite perversely, his credibility will be enhanced in the “minds” of credulous commentators because he never PERSONALLY pushed this particular lie!

 

11) Passive lying (doing nothing to prevent what you know to be a vile slander from lodging in the brains of unsuspecting citizens as truth):

 

a) Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, made the following important point a few weeks back (click here for transcript: http://www.msnbc.com/news/859673.asp), addressing retired general William Perry Smith:

 

“According to the [January 2003] Knight Ridder poll . . ., the people that know the most about the situation in Iraq are least supportive of the war. The ones who are most ignorant, particularly those who believe that half the people who attacked us September 11 included Iraqi citizens, are for the war. So isn’t ‘more education’ something that stops support for the war, General? I mean, the president is not winning on the facts. He’s winning, according to the polls, on those who don’t know the facts…. Well, don’t you think the president ought to make the case, General, that the American people, tell the American people, ‘You’re wrong, half of you out there who think that there were Iraqis who attacked us September 11. They weren’t Iraqis. I’ve got some other reason why I want to attack Iraq.’ He’s never said that. Should he? Or should he allow himself to benefit from people’s ignorance?”

 

Straight-shooting Bush prefers to benefit from the people’s “ignorance,” though “ignorance” is not quite the correct word. People are misinformed because they’ve been deceived by the Prague Connection lie countenanced by Bush and spread by his henchmen.

 

Powell not saying squat about Bush’s repeated declarations that the only purpose for those aluminum tubes Iraq has been trying to buy is to build centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Powell knew there were plenty of doubters in the Energy Department and his own State Department, but the “reluctant warrior” never corrected the president. He allowed Bush to build public and congressional support for war with an outright lie. (If you know there is a valid non-nuclear explanation for a tube, and

you tell Americans there is only a nuclear use, that is a lie. For details, see the tubes section in this article of mine: (http://commondreams.org/views03/0128-08.htm.)

 

12) The pot calling the kettle black:

 

See the comment by Rumsfeld at the start of this essay and the steady stream of comments by Bush and others calling Saddam a liar and labeling the Iraqi strategy “cheat and retreat.” Every time Bush or one of his aides correctly calls Saddam a liar (which is not to suggest he tells nothing but lies), reporters should shout back at the speaker, “Takes one to know one!” If reporters shout it in unison, they’ll be less

likely to suffer reprisals from the childish thugs who control access to administration officials.

 

13) The pot calling the WHITE kettle black (dishonest people stating or implying that honest people or an uncorrupted process can’t be trusted): Administration officials have cast doubt on the integrity of the inspectors and/or the inspection process so as to justify NOT providing them with information with which the inspectors can prove or disprove administration allegations of proscribed weapons or WMD activity.

 

The Bushies know they can keep an allegation alive and productive so long as it has not been disproven. On several occasions in the recent past, the administration has provided inspectors with evidence of possible nuclear or other proscribed activity at a variety of sites.

 

The inspectors have then visited the sites and found no evidence of such activity — and no evidence that such activity had taken place in any recent time. In most instances inspectors have the technical means to figure this out, so it’s not like Iraq can get wind of the inspection and quickly shut down the operation and remove all the equipment, as well as the evidential residue that would tip off the experts.

 

So now the administration is taking a new tack, claiming that it is withholding evidence because the INSPECTORS can’t be trusted! U.S. officials say the Iraqis have infiltrated and thus corrupted the inspections process. Such charges accomplish two things: (1) They support the argument that inspections can never succeed (as does the probably-bogus claim of mobile weapons labs), which undermines any proposal that features inspections. (2) They undermine the credibility and value of the inspectors in the eyes of people who take administration pronouncements at face value — which encompasses virtually all of the U.S. news media and a large chunk of the citizenry.

 

14) “Intentional ignorance” as a tactic to sustain an accusation you know or highly suspect is false:

 

Bush and Powell have built the latest alleged Saddam-al Qaeda connection partly on the activities of an anti-Saddam Islamist group, Ansar-ul-Aslam, based in Kurdish Iraq, which is beyond the control of Saddam’s Baghdad-based government. Among the charges the U.S. has made is that Ansar was operating a chemical and biological weapons lab in its territory. U.S. senators repeatedly asked why the administration

doesn’t simply bomb the cite and never got a satisfactory answer.

 

Here’s the REAL answer: Despite what the administration said for public consumption, it was between 99.9 and 100 percent certain that there was no such weapons lab. If they bombed the town and drove the group out, then the media would come in and verify that there was never was any WMD lab. Not only would the allegation no longer be available in the propaganda campaign, but the administration would be proven to be wrong, dishonest or both. After Powell again made the charge at the U.N. on February 5, Ansar invited journalists to their rudimentary headquarters and demonstrated for all to see that there was no WMD lab or the high-tech infrastructure a WMD lab requires. The allegation has been put to rest, though not before it gave weeks of useful service.

 

15) Passive voice:

 

Matthew Rothschild, editor of the magazine The Progressive, noted that Bush, in his Feb. 26 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, “repeated his favorite passive phrase, ‘If war is forced upon us.’” As Rothschild aptly comments, “No one’s forcing you, George!” (http://www.progressive.org/webex/wx0227b03.html)

 

16) Projecting sincerity that is fraudulent and espousing values you don’t cherish:

 

Bush excels at making eye contact with the camera or a human and projecting sincerity — whether he believes in what he’s saying or is knowingly selling snake oil. In his Feb. 26 American Enterprise Institute address, Bush spoke about his desire to bring democracy to the Middle East, starting with Iraq. But Bush didn’t take office Feb. 26; he’s been president for 25 months. His government has had substantial

leverage over any number of allied regimes in the Middle East, leverage which he could have used to press for democratic reform. To date, he’s shown scant interest. So we’re supposed to believe he’s caught the democracy bug just in time to use it to sell an unpopular war? Last year he welcomed a coup that temporarily displaced the elected president of Venezuela and endorsed crooked elections in Pakistan. He has looked the other way or given the thumbs-up as countless allied governments

have exploited 9-11 to crush dissent and tighten the squeeze on democratic foes. In Afghanistan, he promotes rule by warlords. Even before 9-11, Bush was running the U.S. as if it were his own corporation and he was its authoritarian, secretive, scheming and duplicitous CEO. Bush has strong anti-democratic tendencies, the worst of which is his continuous brazen lying. It would be foolish indeed to take at face value his latest sales pitch: war as a means to democratize the Middle East.

 

17) Talking out of both sides of your mouth:

 

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), referring to Bush’s reported $26 billion inducement to the Turkish government to disregard the 95 percent of Turks opposed to war and allow Turkish territory to be used as a staging ground, said this: “In the very week that we negotiated with Turkey, the administration also told the governors there wasn’t any more money for education and health care.” http://nytimes.com/2003/03/02/opinion/02DOWD.html

 

18) Misrepresentation/Invention.

 

On Sept. 7, 2002, Bush claimed that the International Atomic Energy Agency released a report in 1998 that Saddam was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon. No 1998 IAEA report made any such claim. Then a presidential spokesperson said Bush had referred to a 1991 report. Wrong again. Here’s what the IAEA actually reported in 1998: “There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any

practical significance” (http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020927-500715.htm).

 

19) Withholding the key fact that would alert viewers that the purported grave threat is non-existent.

 

Bush said in his October speech that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could target the United States. The president neglected to tell Americans that Saddam would have to transport these limited-range UAVs — undetected — across the ocean all the way to our coast. The odds of that happening start at a billion to one.

 

20) Creating in the public mind an intense but unfounded fear:

 

“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” (October speech) No nukes, no long-range missiles, no Saddam-delivered “mushroom cloud” over America.

 

21) Using mistranslation, misquotation and context-stripping to plant a frightening impression that is the exact opposite of what you know to be true:

 

“Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his ‘nuclear mujahedeen’ -- his nuclear holy warriors” (Bush’s October speech, repeated by Powell). Here Bush exploits two fears of the public: of Islamist holy-warrior terrorists and nuclear weapons. In “Counter-Dossier II”

(http://traprockpeace.org/weapons.html), Dr. Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge University professor who is the world’s leading authority on U.S. and U.K. claims about the Iraqi regime, observes that the speech Bush is referring to was delivered by Saddam “on 10 September 2000 and was about, in part, nuclear energy. The transcription of the speech was made at the time by the BBC monitoring service. Saddam Hussein actually refers to ‘nuclear energy mujahidin,’ and doesn’t mention the development of weaponry. In addition, the term ‘mujahidin’ is often used in a non-combatant sense, to mean anyone who struggles for a cause. Saddam Hussein, for example, often refers to the mujahidin developing Iraq's medical facilities. There is nothing in the speech to

indicate that Iraq is attempting to develop or threaten the use of nuclear weapons.”

 

22) Straw man:

 

“The risks of doing nothing, the risks of assuming the best from Saddam Hussein, it’s just not a risk worth taking.” Who advocates “doing nothing”? Not France, Russia and Germany. Not Jimmy Carter (http://alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=15084). Who?

 

23) Mixing yourself up with the American people, thus pretending that you and we are one and the same.

 

“This nation,” says the president, “fights reluctantly, because we know the cost, and we dread the days of mourning that always come.” But Bush also says that because he’s the president, he gets to decide. By no stretch of the imagination is Bush a “reluctant warrior.”

 

George W. Bush and Colin Powell simply cannot be trusted. Rather than follow such men into an unnecessary and unprovoked war, we’d be better off thinking about just what we should do with this deceitful duo.

 

http://www.takebackthemedia.com/com-hans-03-0304.html

[Stormig]

Thank you, President Bush

Paulo Coelho

11 - 3 - 2003

 

From the world's most popular novelist, Paulo Coelho, an open letter of praise for President Bush.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you, great leader George W. Bush.

 

Thank you for showing everyone what a danger Saddam Hussein represents. Many of us might otherwise have forgotten that he used chemical weapons against his own people, against the Kurds and against the Iranians. Hussein is a bloodthirsty dictator and one of the clearest expressions of evil in today’s world.

 

But this is not my only reason for thanking you. During the first two months of 2003, you have shown the world a great many other important things and, therefore, deserve my gratitude.

 

So, remembering a poem I learned as a child, I want to say thank you.

 

Thank you for showing everyone that the Turkish people and their parliament are not for sale, not even for 26 billion dollars.

 

Thank you for revealing to the world the gulf that exists between the decisions made by those in power and the wishes of the people. Thank you for making it clear that neither José María Aznar nor Tony Blair give the slightest weight to or show the slightest respect for the votes they received. Aznar is perfectly capable of ignoring the fact that 90% of Spaniards are against the war, and Blair is unmoved by the largest public demonstration to take place in England in the last thirty years.

 

Thank you for making it necessary for Tony Blair to go to the British parliament with a fabricated dossier written by a student ten years ago, and present this as ‘damning evidence collected by the British Secret Service’.

 

Thank you for allowing Colin Powell to make a complete fool of himself by showing the UN Security Council photos which, one week later, were publicly challenged by Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector in Iraq.

 

Thank you for adopting your current position and thus ensuring that, at the plenary session, the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin’s anti-war speech was greeted with applause – something, as far as I know, that has only happened once before in the history of the UN, following a speech by Nelson Mandela.

 

Thank you too, because, after all your efforts to promote war, the normally divided Arab nations were, for the first time, at their meeting in Cairo during the last week in February, unanimous in their condemnation of any invasion.

 

Thank you for your rhetoric stating that ‘the UN now has a chance to demonstrate its relevance’, a statement which made even the most reluctant countries take up a position opposing any attack on Iraq.

 

Thank you for your foreign policy which provoked the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, into declaring that in the 21st century, ‘a war can have a moral justification’, thus causing him to lose all credibility.

 

Thank you for trying to divide a Europe that is currently struggling for unification; this was a warning that will not go unheeded.

 

Thank you for having achieved something that very few have so far managed to do in this century: the bringing together of millions of people on all continents to fight for the same idea, even though that idea is opposed to yours.

 

Thank you for making us feel once more that though our words may not be heard, they are at least spoken – this will make us stronger in the future.

 

Thank you for ignoring us, for marginalising all those who oppose your decision, because the future of the Earth belongs to the excluded.

 

Thank you, because, without you, we would not have realised our own ability to mobilise. It may serve no purpose this time, but it will doubtless be useful later on.

 

Now that there seems no way of silencing the drums of war, I would like to say, as an ancient European king said to an invader: ‘May your morning be a beautiful one, may the sun shine on your soldiers’ armour, for in the afternoon, I will defeat you.’

 

Thank you for allowing us – an army of anonymous people filling the streets in an attempt to stop a process that is already underway – to know what it feels like to be powerless and to learn to grapple with that feeling and transform it.

 

So, enjoy your morning and whatever glory it may yet bring you.

 

Thank you for not listening to us and not taking us seriously, but know that we are listening to you and that we will not forget your words.

 

Thank you, great leader George W. Bush.

 

Thank you very much.

 

 

 

http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/artic...e-2-88-1033.jsp

[Guest Fadi]

Great, but he should have finished that text, with something like that.

 

"Thank you for proving us we are human, and that you are not."

[Stormig]

Indeed... Though I can't know if it belongs to Paulo Coelho for real, all I can say is that it is simple and straight to the point.

[Stormig]

Even the Italian Berlusconi proved an administration of some integrity. Anyone missed him these past weeks? Whatever the hell did happen to the Bush-Blair-Berlusconi bored-beyond-belief three-B team? Nothing said since the U.N. didn't pass the resolution.

 

All empires go to hell...

[Azat]

Well Turkey just minutes ago did allow US troops to use Turkey. I guess $26B is all it takes.

[Guest Fadi]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Azat:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Stormy:

...

Thank you for showing everyone that the Turkish people and their parliament are not for sale, not even for 26 billion dollars.

...

---

Well Turkey just minutes ago did allow US troops to use Turkey. I guess $26B is all it takes.

---

Ehe... Turkey only understand the language of money and war.

 

Yeahooo... America won't have the support of Canada, thats what the prime minister said, no war without the UN.

 

Ah and furthermore, Canada is proposing to form a alliance with France and Germany.

 

[ March 17, 2003, 12:23 PM: Message edited by: Domino ]

[Stormig]

I got this from some other board.

 

[564312]

I wonder what would have happened if the same terrorists used French people as weapons and blew the Eiffel Tower or blew up Kremlin or Toronto CN Tower.

Arden Americayi atamner@ hashvac en.

[Stormig]

56-whatever,

 

Do for me what the Bush administration has not been able to do and show me the Iraqi links to Al Qaeda (and thank you for reminding me of this other hole in their allegations against Iraq).

Or just get lost.

 

[564312]

Stormy you are blowing to the wrong direction.

 

I was just wondering. Just like you I am against war in Iraq. When Bush Administration calls me I will make sure to ask about the evidence and will pass the information to you.