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Recent
Stories
June
12, 2003
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day
War
Wayne
Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign
Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security
Tarif
Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba
Ray
McGovern
Deceived into War: Reflections of
a Former CIA Analyst
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/12
June
11, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Attack of the Hog Killers: Why the
Generals Hate the A-10
Elaine
Cassel
Meet Michael Chertoff: Ashcroft's
Top Gremlin
David Lindorff
The Republican Drive to Eliminate Overtime Pay
Tom
Gorman
Greens, the Antiwar Movement and 2004
Alfredo
Castro
Colombia: The Most Dangerous Place
on Earth for Trade Unionists
Nnimo
Bassey and Lawrence Bohlen
Bush Must Stop Telling Us What to
Eat!
Julie Hilden
Spike Lee v. Spike TV
CounterPunch
Wire
Blair Bros. Change Jobs!
Eric
Hobsbawm
The Empire Expands, Wider and Still
Wider
Steve
Perry
DHS: As Big
a Planning Snafu as Iraq?
June
10, 2003
Benjamin
Shepard
A Season in the Anti-War Movement
Chris
Floyd
Bush Family Lies About Iraq and Nazi
Germany
Wayne
Madsen
Weaponsgate
Jason Leopold
Powell's Denials Ring Hollow
Richard
Lichtman
Whining, Whimpering Leftists Confront the Logic of American World
Domination
Ray
Close
A CIA Analyst on Why the Lies About
WMD Matter
Hammond
Guthrie
Banking on Saddam?
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/10
June
9, 2003
Alex
Coolman
Male Rape in US Prisons
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft is Coming!
Lee
Sustar
Is Iran Next?
Agustin
Velloso
Equatorial Guinea: Few Rich, Many
Poor
Gila
Svirsky
Some Lives Are Worth Less Than Others
Dr. Gerry
Lower
Human Worth in Bush's America
Michael
S. Ladah
A True Liberation
Ishmael Reed
Iraqi Slaughter, Mayhem and Plunder
Steve
Perry
How to Beat Bush, part 1
June
7 / 8, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
The Terrible Truth
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Going Critical: Bush's War on Endangered Species
Joanne
Mariner
Ashcrofts Sides with Torturers
Steven
Sherman
A Different Theory of Everything
Ron Jacobs
Sports, Politics and the 60s
M.
Shahid Alam
Pauperizing the Periphery
Amelia
Peltz
If This is the Road, I'd Rather be Lost
Shelton
Hull
Another Powell, Another Capitulation
Binoy Kampmark
Nuclear Deterrence and North Korea
Ben
Tripp
A Fish Story
Sen. Robert
Byrd
Where is the Outrage?
Robin
Philpot
Congo Distortions
Julie Hilden
Murder and the Matrix
Laura
Flanders
An Interview with Isabel Allende
David Lindorff
The Last Byline
Adam
Engel
Talk Dirty Scary Monsters
Poets'
Basement
Kearney, Reiss, Guthrie, Albert and Hamod
June
6, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft the Insatiable
David
Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers
Anthony
Gancarski
Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege"
Sam
Hamod
His Own Little Country
Sean Carter
Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay?
David
Lindorff
Cracks in the Consensus
Stew Albert
Ari's Great Set
Steve
Perry
Greens and
Moore in 04? No
June
5, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pools of Fire: The Looming Nuclear
Nightmare in the Woods of North Carolina
Imraan
Siddiqi
Ann Coulter's Foul Mouth
Michael
Leon
Clinton, Reno & Waco: Remember What They've Done
Robert
Jensen
Texas Pledge Law Undermines Democracy
Ann Harrison
Rosenthal is Free, But the Fight isn't Over
Paul
Dean
How You Can Be Deliriously Happy in the Age of Bush
Gary Leupp
When Spooks Speak Out
Website
of the Day
Evidence in Black and White?
June
4, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Federal Judge Blinks; Rosenthal
Walks
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
The Isaiah Crowd: The Threat of Neo-Christianity
Jason
Leopold
Manufacturing the Iraq War
John Chuckman
Blackmail as Policy
Mazin
Qumsiyeh
Summit: Peace or Pretense?
Issam Nashashibi
Sharon's Sword of Damocles
Steve
Perry
Wolfowitz of Arabia: the VF interview transcript
June
3, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Copycat Killers: Bush, Jakarta and
the Slaughter in Aceh
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Tells All
Elaine
Cassel
We Interrupt Your Normal Show to Bring You an Important Message
from Michael Powell: "Go to Hell, Americans!"
Tom
Crumpacker
The Politics of US Cuba Policy
William
S. Lind
Fourth Generation Warfare in Iraq
Sam
Hamod
The Final Brick in the Wall
Uri
Avnery
The Altalena Affair
Hammond
Guthrie
Stepping into Some Deep DARPA
Steve
Perry
The WashTimes'
al-Qaeda nuke "exclusive"
June
2, 2003
Arundhati
Roy
Day of the Jackals
Norman
Madarasz
Behind the Neo-Con Curtain: Plato,
Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom
Alain
Frachon and Daniel Vernet
The Strategist and the Philosopher: Strauss and Wohlstetter
Anthony
Gancarski
Anti-Imperialism, Then & Now
Standard
Schaefer
Wasted at the Pentagon
Jason
Leopold
Rocky's Advice to the Dems
Guthrie
& Albert
HUAC 58 Years Letter
Steve
Perry
The Politics of Terror Alerts
May
31, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
A Whiner Called Horowitz
Gary Leupp
The Frauds of War
Dave
Lindorff
Clinton, Bush, Lies and Impeachment
Tom Stephens
Does It Matter that the Bush Administration Lied?
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Who Is Next?
Joanne
Mariner
Trivializing Terrorism
Wayne
Madsen
Ayatollah Ashcroft's Busy Week
Larry Magnuson
Is a Television a Radio or a Billboard?
Elaine
Cassel
Wake Up, America!
Gila Svirsky
Waiting for the Lament to End
Susan
Davis
Kitchen Dreams
Chris Clarke
Barbra Streisand: Environmental Hypocrite
Chris
Floyd
Bush Locates Source of World Evil: God
Adam Engel
Gravity's End Zone
Poets'
Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Orloski, Albert
May
30, 2003
Ben
Tripp
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda
Neve
Gordon
The Bad Fence
Todd
Steiner
Endangered Ocean
Robert
Freeman
Bush's Tax Cuts: a Form of National Insanity
Sean
Carter
Utah Gets Fired Up for Executions
Daniel
Bacher
How Bush's War Violated International Laws
Tariq
Ali
Re-Colonizing Iraq
Steve
Perry
Bush Wars
Web Log
May
29, 2003
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Jason
Leopold
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports,
US Plans Overthrow of Iran Regime
Ron
Jacobs
Popular Uprising, Inc.
Michelle
Ciaccorra
Bush's Nuclear Policy: Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Yves Engler
The Economics of Health Care in
America: Pay More to Die Sooner
Kimberly
Blaker
Vouchers for Jesus
Harry
Browne
Stakeknife: Britain's Army Spy at
the Top of the IRA
Stew
Albert
Cops of the World
Steve Perry
Greens 04: In or Out?
Hot Stories
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
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June
13, 2003
If You Don't Believe
Us, You Support Saddam
Missing
Weapons, Shrinking Bush and the Media
By MICHAEL LEON
As even the mass media begin to ask why we went
to war, the accounting of George W. Bush's stated justifications
for war has begun in earnest.
"Intelligence gathered by this and
other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues
to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised
(March 17, 2003 address to the nation and the people of Iraq),"
intoned Bush in a typical pitch.
In fact, the lack of found WMDs is cause
for enormous doubt that Bush spoke truthfully, and his diminished
character is on display for all to see.
Even that atonal noise that the war drums
along the Potomac beat through the corporate mass media may finally
be abated, as Bush faces the music for his lies and half-truths.
One can look on with disbelief at the
contortions now made to defend Bush's stated case for war, as
they get sillier with each passing day.
Last Sunday's New York Times has a letter
("Iraq's Weapons," June 8, 2003) to the editor written
by Victoria Clarke, assistant secretary of defense for public
affairs. Responding to a Times column by Paul Krugman ("Standard
Operating Procedure," June 3, 2003) in which Krugman essentially
calls a Bush a liar, Clarke spins: "Clearly, [Krugman] prefers
placing his trust in Saddam Hussein rather than in United States
officials who acted in good faith on the best information available....
The threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction
is a documented fact."
In other words if you do not believe
Bush, you trust Saddam Hussein. And Bush did not lie because
Bush did not lie, he acted in good faith, on the best information
and a documented fact. I guess Clarke never had a decent sixth-grade
English teacher to advise her that simply stating her conclusion
over and over is not an argument. Then again, repetition of message
is what passes for administration argument.
(Memo to Ms. Clarke: There is no serious
nuclear weapons program in Iraq, there are not 1000s of "tons"
of chemical or biological agents. There has never been collusion
between the secular Hussein and the fundamentalist bin Laden.
And the most that we will find is a skeleton chemical and biological
program, proving the lie that there was an urgent need to invade
Iraq to wipe out the threat. A potential "mushroom cloud"
over Manhattan and so forth are lies intended to frighten. Your
boss is a liar and so are you. Sorry.)
What really kills is Clarke's admonition
that "It is far too early to make any judgments. We have
an extensive effort under way. Let's allow our team to finish
the job before drawing conclusions." She must watch the
comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert a lot; they made the
same ironic point asserting that the anti-war activists calling
for the United Nations inspectors to be allowed to do their job
were right after all, but the butt of their joke was Bush.
The New Republic
The New Republic has been pounding the
war drums as hard as the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street
Journal, and it has vigorously taken up the administration's
defense. After Paul Wolfowitz admitted in Vanity Fair that the
administration had focused on the threat that Iraq posed using
WMDs on the United States as the reason to go to war because
of "bureaucratic reasons" to reach consensus, Robert
Lane Greene (The New Republic Online, "Bureaucratic Screw
Up," June 3, 2003) rushed to Wolfowitz' defense. "If,
as Wolfowitz suggests, the only thing the various squabbling
members of the American foreign policy establishment could agree
on about Iraq was that it possessed WMD, then the evidence that
they saw must have been pretty compelling."
Greene is apparently serious.
One wonders whether Greene really believes
there was no political pressure from the White House to simply
find a casus belli for policy that was stated as explicitly desired
by Bush policymakers years before and during their current service
in the administration.
Curiously, Greene continues in the next
paragraph: "As Iraqi WMD remain conspicuously absent some
six weeks after the war's end, it is growing increasingly plausible
that Americans were misled into thinking the WMD threat was more
imminent than it was. It goes without saying that it would be
devastating to the credibility of our intelligence apparatus
if it turned out that certain intelligence officials played up
the WMD risk to tell George W. Bush and the Pentagon what they
wanted to hear."
Was the evidence viewed by Defense and
State "pretty compelling" or not? If not pretty compelling,
Defense, State and the White House all lied.
Greene offers an analogy to support the
invasion of Iraq in the event that the weapons-of-mass-destruction
rationale is proven vacuous:
"So, having knocked Saddam from
power, it turns out that America may have done so for the wrong
reasons. But imagine this, a scenario a thoughtful antiwar friend
posed to me before the war: Your neighbor, you have good reason
to believe but you cannot definitively prove, has purchased weapons
that could be used against your family. You further believe,
based on his history of violence, that he's prone to using them.
(He's been arrested on a few aggravated assault charges over
the years.) Would your going over and killing him be immoral,
given your thin evidence? Possibly. But what if, upon having
dispatched him, you find in his home grotesque evidence that
he was a serial murderer, and that his victims had included his
own family--meaning his capacity for violence is much deeper
than even you suspected. You may initially feel guilt for having
attacked him for the wrong reasons. But in the end, you have
killed a vile murderer who would otherwise have escaped justice,
perhaps to kill again. Are you a dangerous vigilante, or a hero?"
To respond to this inept analogy, imagine
this: In a neighborhood far, far away lives a maniac who used
to be your favored trading partner and to whom you used to give
intelligence and other support, despite the fact that you knew
violent history and you were aware of grotesque evidence that
he was a serial murderer, and that his victims had included his
own family. And suppose that you support this type of maniac
in numerous other neighborhoods against the advice of human rights
workers and most of the world. Do you say to yourself, "What
the hell kind of policy do I have, and whom do I count as my
friends?"
Say you invaded this particular maniac's
house 12 years ago after he killed his neighbors and occupied
their houses. Your invasion killed 1,000's of innocents living
in the house, and instead of deposing the maniac then, you left
him in charge after you departed. Subsequently, you blockaded
the house and deprived the innocents of medical care and clean
water killing 100,000s of children, and the innocents remained
prisoners unable to leave their house for over a decade. But
with the help of other neighborhoods, you instituted a policy
of containment that effectively isolated and controlled the maniac.
After 12 years you hire some friends
who have written that they wish to kill this maniac and be king
of his neighborhood, using the killer's house for their own purposes.
So you express your intention to again invade the house. All
of the man's immediate neighbors formally say in effect: "No,
there is no threat anymore. The man has no reach. We do not fear
him," and ask you not to invade. Many other households and
neighborhoods tell you not to invade. Most of the entire world
asks you not to invade, concerned about killing more of the innocents
in the maniac's house. You then lie and say that this maniac--with
his dilapidated house and his decrepit war machine--is capable
of launching nuclear, biological, and chemical bombs over far-away
Manhattan, much to the world's chagrin who think that you are
just plain nuts.
Instead of treating the maniac as an
isolated, deranged criminal, and trying to get help for the innocents
trapped under his rule, you invade again, hurting decades-long
relationships with other neighborhoods, killing 1,000s; and then
demand to the long-suffering innocent house members that they
do what you say, under threat of imprisonment and death. The
innocent house members now ask you to leave. What do you do now?
Are you a dangerous vigilante, or a hero,
or someone with a real problem concerning the type of friends
you keep?
The Shrinking Bush
To return directly to the topic of the
lack of WMDs giving the lie to claims that Iraqi military power
posed a threat to the United States, it is clear that the Bush
lies are a burgeoning threat to his presidency.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a declared
presidential candidate who does not back down from a fight, and
30 members of Congress introduced last week a Resolution of Inquiry
in the House of Representatives to force the Administration to
turn over the intelligence to back its unproven claims that Iraq
has WMDs. For a president intent on riding the Iraq war to victory,
this change of discussion could be catastrophic.
Bush has bet the future of his administration
on the war. He found a way to sell the war by preying on the
emotional and trusting mood of an entire country after 9/11,
manipulating the tragedy to implement the geo-political dogma
of a small band of right-wing radicals.
Bush basks in his short-term political
success, as the media follows the Rove script and applauds him
for his courage and grit, and speaks of how mighty he is now,
certain to be re-elected.
But the adulation and image will not
endure. The American public will not stand for a president who
blatantly lies to them. And the peace movement as usual has been
underestimated. Do not forget the peace movement took down Johnson,
and ultimately Nixon who could not cope with it, resorting to
dirty tricks and more lying.
Bush will soon be seen by a sufficient
number of Americans for what he is--as Ralph McGill once wrote
of another weak and miserable anti-minority governor--"a
little man standing alone in his own diminishing circle."
Michael Leon
has been published in The Progressive, In These Times, and CounterPunch.
He can be reached at: maleon@terracom.net.
Today's
Features
Gary
Leupp
The Intel-gate Row in Britain: a Chronology
Ahmad Faruqui
The Tragic Legacy of the Six Day
War
Wayne
Madsen
Unfit for Office: Time for Rumsfeld to Resign
Laura Carlsen
Hunger and Security
Tarif
Abboushi
Warm and Fuzzy in Aqaba
Ray
McGovern
Deceived into War: Reflections of
a Former CIA Analyst
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars
Web Log 6/12
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