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2004-02-07 - 8:41 a.m.

Jon Carroll: 'Thank Howard Dean for leading the Democrats out of the darkness'

Here's a well-deserved tribute to Howard Dean, from the San Francisco Chronicle, for speaking out loudly and articulately when no one else was. He tapped into a deep reservoir of anger toward the Bush administration policies, and caught the wave for awhile. And he gave the other candidates the courage to speak out as well.

His campaign seems to be running out of steam by now, since everyone seems to be jumping onto the Kerry bandwagon, even though only around ten percent of the delegates have been chosen so far.

We can blame the corporate media for turning on him (right after his comments about re-regulating the media) and spreading the suggestion that he wasn't electable, as well as ridiculing "the scream."

It's sobering to see how much power the media has in determining our candidates' fortunes, which bodes ill for the real election. Though, hopefully, there will still be enough of us who won't be swayed by the deluge of Bush propaganda that is sure to wash over us all like a flood. Bush has the corporations behind him, including the corporate media, which is sad comment on the moral health of our country, when impeachment would be a more righteous course.

Some excerpts:

Like a lot of people, I was grateful when Howard Dean started sounding off about the war in Iraq. It was easy to hear him because almost every other politician had been bullied by the administration into silence.

...

Imagine: an elected Democrat who said out loud that Sept. 11, 2001, did not justify all excesses, did not explain all malign or stupid decisions. An elected Democrat who gave other elected Democrats permission to find their courage. Even better: an elected Democrat who demonstrated that Bush-bashing might be a noble and necessary occupation.

...

Now people believe that Bush can be beaten. His popularity rating has dipped below 50 percent for the first time since the election (when it was also below 50 percent but, hey, let's not go there again). Now people are voting for John Kerry on the interesting thesis that he has the best chance of beating Bush. Imagine that.

Meanwhile, Bush is getting careless. His latest budget will put a $100, 000 debt burden on every man, woman and child in the United States. I didn't say that, David M. Walker, the comptroller general of the United States, said that. Sometime, this unwieldy construction of lies is bound to fail.

Maybe Abe Lincoln was right after all: You can't fool all of the people all of the time.

Whoever the Democratic nominee is, he should thank Howard Dean for leading his party out of the darkness. The electorate is energized; people are finally paying attention to the Bush bunco schemes. Good going, Howard; whatever happens, you done good.

Read the whole column here.

2004-02-03 - 3:56 p.m.

Bush Wants to Scapegoat CIA

Jim Lobe, who has written a lot about the neo-cons who have been shaping this administration's foreign policy, writes an insightful article about the president's plans to shift the blame to the CIA, rather than take responsibility for his administration's disastrous Iraq invasion, which was based on exaggerations and lies.

Some excerpts follow:

Badly wounded by the total collapse of its prewar contentions that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, the administration of President George W. Bush has embarked on a strategy of diversion and delay.

It hopes to divert attention from the role played by senior administration officials in influencing and exaggerating the intelligence assessments of the Iraqi threat in the run-up to the war by focusing debate instead on flaws in the intelligence and how it can be improved in the future.

It hopes to delay until well after the November presidential elections the reporting deadline for a proposed commission that will study the fiasco.

"This is damage control," said one Congressional aide, who added the president's reelection chances might well hinge on whether he is able to pull off the strategy. "Bush wants to get this out of the headlines and into a commission that won't say anything until he's reelected."

Bush, who is helped by the fact that Republicans control key committees in Congress, appears able to count as well on David Kay, whose statements after he resigned as the man in charge of the U.S. hunt for weapons of mass destruction (WMD), in Iraq last week set off the White House's latest maneuvers.

...

In their view, the professional intelligence community did indeed make serious mistakes. But they charge as well that the administration effectively encouraged it to make those mistakes and, to make matters worse, deliberately exaggerated the assessments to make the Iraqi threat sound more ominous than even the intelligence community's flawed reports said it was.

"Did the intelligence shape policy, or did the policy shape intelligence"? asked Melvin Goodman, a top Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Soviet expert during the Cold War who currently teaches at the National War College.

Like other intelligence veterans who have remained in touch with their former colleagues, Goodman says Kay's assertions the administration did not pressure analysts are simply "wrong."

"I've talked with analysts at CIA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and they all claim there was tremendous pressure put on them," Goodman told IPS.

The fact, according to Goodman, that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld created an Office of Special Plans (OSP) outside the formal intelligence channels with the specific mandate to reassess raw intelligence in order to find alleged links between Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist group suggests the administration was applying that pressure in unconventional ways.

"When Rumsfeld couldn't get what he wanted, he created his OSP," Goodman said. "That really gives away the whole game right there."

...

Greg Thielmann, a WMD specialist at the State Department's bureau of intelligence and research who worked on Iraq until his retirement in late 2002, also disputes Kay's assertion the administration had nothing to do with the intelligence failure.

"Everyone knew that the White House was deaf to any information that would not substantiate its charges; that is a very unproductive environment for any intellectual inquiry," he said in a telephone interview.

"The White House was never searching for the truth; it was searching for arguments to make the case for war," he continued. "They were searching for evidence to support the conclusions they had already reached."

...

"And the reason is that the administration did not care what was going on on the ground. It was interested in going to war and convincing the American people and the international community that war was necessary," he said.

...

But Republican control of the two intelligence committees means the administration has been able to effectively limit the scope of their investigations, making it far more difficult for Democrats to obtain additional evidence by forcing key officials to testify or to publicize their findings.

Democrats are clearly worried that a Bush-appointed presidential commission will be similarly limited in what it can or cannot investigate.

They are also concerned that the commission's work schedule might be designed to bury the issue of whether the administration deliberately misled the country into going to war until after the elections.

Go here to read the entire article.

And here's a similar article from the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau by Jonathan S. Landay, Warren P. Strobel and Joseph L. Galloway with the title "Bush's inquiry into Iraq intelligence must include Cheney, Pentagon."

Some excerpts follow:

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, didn’t dispute that the CIA failed to accurately assess the state of Iraq’s weapons programs. But they said that the intelligence efforts led by Cheney magnified the errors through exaggeration, oversights and mistaken deductions.

Those efforts bypassed normal channels, used Iraqi exiles and defectors of questionable reliability, and produced findings on former dictator Saddam Hussein's links to al Qaida and his illicit arms programs that were disputed by analysts at the CIA, the State Department and other agencies, the officials said. “There were more agencies than CIA providing intelligence . . . that are worth scrutiny, including the (Pentagon’s now-disbanded) Office of Special Plans and the office of the vice president,” said a former senior military official who was involved in planning the Iraq invasion.

Some of the disputed findings were presented as facts to Americans as Bush drummed up his case for war.

2004-02-03 - 12:13 p.m.

Does the End Justify the Means?

In this insightful article in the Los Angeles Times, entitled, "The Lies That Bind Us to Iraq," Robert Scheer raises this question, and points out the danger of such thinking.

Some excerpts follow:

The central sickness of human history is the notion that the ends justify the means, and it has disastrously gripped political movements from left to right and from the secular to the religious. It is axiomatic that immoral means will inevitably corrupt the noblest of ends, as has been displayed from the fatal hubris of the Roman Empire down through the genocidal policies of the last century's nationalists, communists and colonialists and on through the suicide bombers of today.

Yet this profoundly immoral posture has been embraced by President Bush in justifying his preemptive war against Iraq, even when the much-touted Iraqi threat proved at best to be based on inexcusable ignorance and at worst to be impeachable fraud. The undemocratic means employed by Bush — misinforming the public, Congress and the United Nations — are now somehow to be justified by the ends of "building democracy" in Iraq. This is a daunting challenge that the American people never signed on for and which seems as elusive a goal today as a year ago.

Once again we seem unwilling to fully grasp the lesson of Vietnam, our other major exercise in preemptive war based on the theories of ivory-tower intellectuals with dreams of a Pax Americana. For those requiring a refresher course in that previous folly, which so fractured our own country while devastating three others, check out the new documentary "The Fog of War," in which the Vietnam adventure's prime architect, Robert S. McNamara, tearfully concedes it was all a grand mistake.

...

Today, in Iraq, we again have been battered senseless by the argument that it is "irresponsible" to leave, even when it is clear we are no longer welcome. Those who dare suggest that our continued presence as an occupier is actually part of the problem — like presidential candidate Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) — are pilloried as unrealistic. But attempting to alter other people's history — while also serving our own economic and political needs — leads almost inevitably to quagmire, blowback and a nonsensical path of trying to make future truth of past lies: We didn't go to Iraq to save it, but now we have to save it to excuse the fact that we went.

Go to the LA Times site to read the entire article. Or if you don't wish to register (free) for their site, it is also reprinted in its entirety at this site, with no registration required.

2004-02-01 - 2:32 p.m.

A Scandal Greater than Watergate

Here's an article by Eric Margolis in the Toronto Sun, that puts the Iraq invasion, which was based on either lies or bad intelligence, into proper perspective.

Some excerpts follow:

"We were all wrong," White House chief weapons hunter and longtime war booster David Kay admitted last week. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, as the U.S. and Britain had long alleged.

Iraq's nuclear weapons, death rays, vans of death, drones of death, mobile germ labs, poison gas factories, hidden weapons depots, long-range missiles, links to al-Qaida - all were bogus.

The only thing real is Iraq's oil.

If Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD), as it long insisted, we must draw one of two conclusions.

Either President George Bush, and secretaries Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, lied about the global threat they claimed Iraq posed, and deceived Congress and the American people. Or, they were grossly misinformed by their intelligence experts and must be judged fools of the first order.

If Bush and his team of chest-thumping, self-proclaimed national security experts were really misinformed about Iraq's weapons and capabilities, then they started a war by mistake - and presided over the two biggest national security fiascos since Pearl Harbor: the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq.

It turns out President Saddam Hussein, whom Bush repeatedly branded a "liar," was in fact telling the truth all along when he said all of Iraq's old weapons systems had been destroyed. It was Bush and British PM Tony Blair who weren't telling the truth.

...

Confronted by these ugly facts, Bush tried to rebrand the unprovoked war against Iraq by claiming it was justified because Saddam was such a horrid man.

What arrant hypocrisy.

...

But active and retired CIA officers kept warning the public and media (including this writer) that intelligence on Iraq had been deeply manipulated and politicized by a cabal of pro-war neo-conservative ideologues in the Pentagon and the vice president's office.

They were ignored.

A shadowy Pentagon intelligence unit was created by the neo-cons to whip up war fever against Iraq.

It fed either fake or wildly exaggerated reports about Iraq to the White House and Pentagon, which were then trumpeted by the neo-con media.

For more firsthand information about this neo-con cabal in the Pentagon, recruited from the PNAC thinktank by Vice President Cheney, you might want to read this three part series in The American Conservative, by retired Lt.Col Karen Kwiatkowski, who worked in close proximity to them at the Pentagon. It is very enlightening.

As she stated, American foreign policy was "hijacked" by this group of idealogues, and the mess we're in in Iraq is the direct result of their arrogance and incompetence.

Continuing with the article by Margolis:

"Do you feel vindicated?" a radio show host asked me last week. "You predicted a year ago that no WMD would be found in Iraq."

Not vindicated. Just dismayed.

Dismayed by the continuing widespread indifference - or even approval - by many Americans of the aggression against Iraq that violated international law and basic norms of civilized behaviour.

Dismayed by the craven attitude of the U.S. Congress and mainstream media.

And deeply concerned by growing hatred for the U.S. around the globe.

Too few Americans seem troubled their president either lied or blundered into a horrible mess in Iraq, so far costing 520 American dead, nearly 10,000 casualties and $200 billion US for 2003-04.

This is an historic malfeasance far exceeding in gravity Nixon's Watergate scandal or Bill Clinton's prevarications about sex.

The war fever and xenophobia fostered by the Bush administration continues to grip America.

I am not comparing the U.S. to Nazi Germany.

But one does begin to understand in all this how the Germans, another educated and highly civilized people, were driven in the 1930s by a campaign of fear and lies, into supporting a policy of aggression, religious hatred and racism.

Read the entire article here, and go here to read the series on the neo-cons by Karen Kwiatkowski.

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