|
CounterPunch
March 5,
2003
CounterPunch Diary
Invasion
by Cellphone; Why Let Facts Stop a Good War?; John Barry's Unfeted
Scoop; More on Goldberg's "Journalism"; Hitchens: the
Jampot File
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
CounterPunch hears that the top 2,500 Iraqis have
been getting calls on their cellphones from US intelligence officers
telling them that if they lay down their arms when D-day comes
they may escape trial for war crimes. One seasoned Iraqi hand
tells us the US did the same thing in 1991, but that often the
calls got screwed up.
Few predict prolonged resistance. Estimates
of the duration of any war range from 5 minutes to three weeks.
But one CounterPuncher recalls Kim Philby, the KGB's double agent
inside MI6, remembering that when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union
upper-class buffers in Philby's London club all opined that it
would be over in a week or so. Only one grizzled old clubman
said it might take "three weeks or more". Philby added,
"The silly old fool was right."
Meanwhile we hear indirectly from a Pakistani
high-up that the calculation from Taliban-symps in Islamabad
is that when US attention is entirely deflected to Iraq and North
Korea, the low level conflict currently ongoing in Afghanistan
will amp up, with the Taliban reasserting itself more and more
openly. This source said US forces were sustaining regular losses.
On this last point we recall Charlie
Clements once saying that the way the Pentagon played losses
in Vietnam at one period was not to lie outright about casualties,
but simply to trickle them out. Suppose you had 300 in one battle.
You wouldn't announce that, but dole out 100 casualties a month
in a low-key way.
To our mind the most significant story
of the season was the one by John Barry in a recent Newsweek.
On February 24, Newsweek's issue dated March 3 reported that
the Iraqi weapons chief who defected from the regime in 1995
told U.N. inspectors that Iraq had destroyed its entire stockpile
of chemical and biological weapons and banned missiles, exactly
as Iraq claims. Gen. Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's former son
in law who defected and who was killed shortly after returning
to Iraq in 1996, was debriefed by officials from the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the U.N.inspections team, UNSCOM.
Barry got hold of the transcript of that
debriefing. Kemal told the inspectors, in Barry's words in Newsweek,
"that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical
and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.
"All that remained were "hidden blueprints, computer
disks, microfiches" and production molds. The weapons were
destroyed secretly, in order to hide their existence from inspectors,
in the hopes of someday resuming production after inspections
had finished. The CIA and MI6 were told the same story, Barry
reported, and "a military aide who defected with Kamel...
backed Kamel's assertions about the destruction of WMD stocks."
But these statements were "hushed
up by the U.N. inspectors" in order to "bluff Saddam
into disclosing still more."
On February 26, FAIR reports, a complete copy of the Kamel transcript-
an internal UNSCOM/IAEA document stamped "sensitive"--
was obtained by Glen Rangwala, the Cambridge University analyst
who in early February revealed Tony Blair's "intelligence
dossier" was plagiarized from a student
thesis. Rangwala has posted the Kamel transcript on the Web:
http://casi.org.uk/info/unscom950822.pdf.
In other words Bush, Blair and rest have
them have known perfectly well all along that there are no chemical
and biological war stocks to be found. No one seriously maintains
that Iraq has any nuclear capability.
Barry's tremendous scoop in Newsweek
was ignored by the mainstream press. Why let facts get in the
way of a good war?
When Jeffrey
Goldberg Did Brazil
Jeffrey Goldberg is the New Yorker fantasist
whose work on Al Qaeda, so succulent to the Bush crowd I
discussed here last week. No continent is safe from his inventive
pen.
On Oct 28, 2002, The New Yorker published
a Jeffrey Goldberg piece called "The Party of God: Hezbollah
Sets Up Operations in South America and the United States".
It "confirmed" -- in his mind, NPR's mind, and all
of the right wing pundits' minds that Hezbollah had long set
up shop in the "Triple Frontier" of Argentina, Paraguay,
and Parana state, Brazil,
A journalist and Friend of CounterPunch
who lives in that region part of the year who read Goldberg's
story at the time and who wrote a letter of protest to the New
Yorker, recalls:
"It is incredible that one journalist,
who has as his mainstay the theme that Arabs are plotting to
kill Jews and destroy America's 'interests', could come and visit
Brasil just to see if Hezbollah is operating here, and voila,
he found' em running rampant. It was an impressive feat of research
actually. Not only did Goldberg come up with what many here thought
was a far-fetched hypothesis -- could the Hezbollah be funding
anti-Israel/US operations from the Triple Frontier -- but he
proved that they are doing just that, all by himself. No reporter
in this part of the world has been able to find the slightest
bit of evidence along those lines. I'm fairly convinced that
his claim is irresponsible, and a slap in the face to the peaceful
communities that exist here. Even the police, who monitor narco-trafficking,
don't see the link.
The CounterPuncher phoned the Ministry
of Justice in Brasilia in November and talked to the Justice
Minister's assistant who confirmed that joint Brazilian, Paraguayan
and Argentine federal police, including undercover forces, had
not found any evidence that Arabs involved in narco-trafficking
were laundering money into terrorist operations. There WERE some
arrests made in these Arab communities along the triple frontier,
for CD piracy. But all of the arrests that were made post-Sept
11 were minor charges, and the Arabs that were held were let
go.
The
Jampot File
(Just Another
Middle-Aged Porker of the Right)
Hitchens
and Booze:
Waiter! Another Round
Dear CounterPunch
I'm a recovering alcoholic, a veteran
of 2,000 serious hangovers. On the peaks of the boozekriegs that
preceded the hangovers, I did 99 of the 101 genuinely dumb things
I've done in my 37-year life. Usually, these 99 big errors entailed
idiotic unreasoned blurts and betrayals. I've always suspected
that Hitchens' take on the 9/11 attacks were both written and
sent off to publishers in the middle of one of his all-time benders,
which probably spanned the first several post-attack days. Go
back and look, for instance, at his self-pitying blind dull rage
at seeing the wreckage. How many belts had Hitch popped back
on the train up to Manhattan?
Wild, solipsistic statements and damnations
over my capital-A Angers as I flailed about in a hooch-enflamed
mind: Been there, done that, oh, so many times. I wonder if Alex
Cockburn could look back on Hitchens' earliest post-9/11 columns
and corroborate this.
Hitchens, alas, apparently isn't likely
ever to avail himself of the 9th AA step, which is apologizing
and making amends to those you've harmed while liquored up.
Peace,
Michael Dawson
Portland, Oregon
Michael, ONLY a hundred and one dumb
things? You've lived a careful life, bro. Our recollection of
his early post-9/11 columns, with demented outbursts about Chomsky,
fits with your theory.
Dear (very dear) CounterPunch,
Just a point or two about the Hitchens
thing. He's fair (and fun) game because he ludicrously believes
himself to be, as we used to say in high school, better than
everybody else, and this all is reinforced by getting handsomely
rewarded for being a pain in the ass. It doesn't really need
to be any more highfalutin than that. Some of America's weird
mix of hedonism and Puritanism has shown up in the reactions
to Hitchens's idiocies, but I can't help but think that it boils
down to this: he lavishly defends boozing only because HE does
it. He'll be just as off the mark about the joys and benefits
and superiorities of abstemiousness when his Doctor gives him
the word that it's either him or the gin.
Another small point or two, people flatter
Hitchens when they call him a "contrarian", a much
more accurate term is negative conformist, which is really just
the bad-tempered manifestation of conformity. Suggesting he has
Korsakoff's Syndrome implies that, alas, he used to be brilliant.
Hard to swallow (harhar) about a guy who wrote in the early nineties
that political correctness would be one of the worst problems
facing the world in the future - quite the prognosticator.
Cheers
Jill Abson
Montreal, Quebec
Re "contrarian", I always thought
that word had the staginess of the school debating society. I
write as one who toured Scottish schools in the late 1950s with
my friend Freddy Fitzpayne, offering as our debating motion,
"Britain Should Leave NATO Now". Our opponents would
have their own, different topics, and so our fiery speeches flew
past each other without touching. We got to the quarterfinals,
before suffering defeat at the hands of a duo from Dollar Academy,
defending some controversial form of pig breeding. My next debating
speech was at Keble College, Oxford, in 1961 where I could find
no seconder in the Junior Common room to my motion, condemning
the UN for its sabotage of Patrice Lumumba.
Dear Messrs. Cockburn and St. Clair,
Having followed Christopher Hitchens's
attempts to shame the left en masse over Afghanistan and Iraq
and the ripostes offered by both CounterPunch and others, many
of which have seen fit to make his drinking an issue, I venture
this opinion: Regardless of whether Hitchens has finally joined
Nebuchanezzar in loony-land or not, it would be nice if some
of those correspondents who've written him off because of the
bottle would cite the sources of their essentially medical diagnoses.
Perhaps Martin Maloney is a doctor and
space prohibited CounterPunch from disclosing that fact. If not,
why didn't Maloney disclose the source of his pronouncements
on the relationship between alcohol, sleep, dreaming and mental
salubrity. I suspect there's a lot of truth in what Maloney says
(as it happens, I once served Hitchens when I worked room service
at the Mark Hopkins Hotel, San Francisco, and his order for booze
gave Hunter Thompson a run for the money), but if what Maloney
says is common knowledge, I haven't seen it and I read the occasional
issue of Lancet at the library. Would CounterPunch accept a layman's
uncorroborated word on St. John's Wort? Viagra? It's not like
neurologists aren't in the phone book.
I agreed with Hitchens on the bombing
of Afghanistan and in general agree with him that Islamofascism
isn't all in Charles Krauthammers' head. That didn't prevent
me from feeling disgust at the ad hominem lobs he hurled at people
who have offered intelligent reasons for opposing Bush on Iraq.
And yes, Hitchens' drinking is a public issue and newsworthy.
Please don't incite the same disgust with armchair MD diagnoses
of Hitchens' likely disconnect with reality. That should be beneath
you.
Cordially,
Douglas Presler
Oakland, California
We don't know when Martin Maloney is
an MD or a doctor of medieval philosophy, or a guy who quit high
school to run a pool hall. Would we have felt his interesting
letter to be more credible if it had had the initials MD after
it, or if he disclosed he'd studied at the Pavlov Institute?
Not particularly.. These days applied psychology is mostly an
outlier of the pharmaceutical industry.
"In the 1990s, youth psychotropic
drug treatment rates nearly reached adult rates, with two to
three times more children receiving psychotropic medication of
all types, promoted by pharmaceutical companies, prescribed by
medical doctors, dispensed during the school year by parents
and public school personnel." That's Christine
TenBarge in the next issue of our CounterPunch newsletter, exclusive
to subscribers, on the surge in psychotropic dosing of kids
in the 90s.
We Built
the Plant,
We Built the Planes
That Bombed The Plant
Dear CounterPunch
I just wanted to add to your info regarding
US support for Iraq in the 1980s. I was working then as a machinist
in the GE Steam Turbine Dept. in Lynn, MA. (I was later laid
off as GE licensed its turbine mfr. to Japan and Korea; the only
turbine work left in Lynn today is marine propulsion for US Navy
ships and submarines.)
Sometime in the mid-1980's one of our
last civilian projects was a power plant for Iraq. I don't know
the details of exactly where it was installed. I only built it.
But I suppose it was bombed and destroyed in the first Gulf war
-- no doubt by F-18 Navy fighters, among others, whose engines
were built in another part of the same GE plant . . .
Jeff Klein
Today's
Features
Ann Harrison
No
Lock Up for Medical Marijuana Advocate Jeff Jones!
Gary Leupp
A Very
Fine Thing: Turkey Stands Up to Bush
Winslow T. Wheeler
Inside
the Pentagon's Pork Factory
Chris Floyd
Swing
Blades: How Rumsfeld Filled His Pockets with Pyongyang's Nuclear
Loot
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Sleight of Hand
Ron Lare
UAW Local
600's Opposition to War
David Krieger
Meanwhile, Back at the Security Council
Ralph Nader
How MSNBC Sabotaged Donahue
Anthony Gancarski
Somebody Blew Up Donahue: a Response to Ralph Nader
Harry Browne
The
Curse of Bono
Website of the Day
Squat
Net
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax--Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|