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Today's
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February
3, 2004
Jordan
Green
Democratic Patronage in Northern New
Mexico
February
2, 2004
Gary
Leupp
The Buddhist Nun in Tom Ridge's Jail
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Manners of Their Deaths: Capital Punishment in a Smoke-Free
Environment
Tom
Wright
The Prosecution of Captain Yee
Winslow
Wheeler
Inside the Bush Defense Budget
Lee Ballinger
Janet Jackson's Naked Truth
Leonard
Pitts, Jr
For Blacks, the Game of Justice is
Rigged
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Website
of the Day
Resistance:
In the Eye of the American Hegemon
Jan. 31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
January
27, 2004
Steve
Philion
Ritter Was Right: My Exchange with
CNN's Aaron Brown
Daniel
Ellsberg
Leak Against This War: Expose the
Lies from the Inside
C.G.
Estabrook
Can George Ever Really be Elected
President?
Josh
Frank
Hot Coals in Vermont: Dean's Smoke
Screens
Greg
Moses
Racism 101 All Over Again
Gilad
Atzmon
Blood, Soil and Art
Mike
Ferner
"We're All Lied To": an
Interview with Bruce Cockburn in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
General Disorders of the Day
January
26, 2004
Sean
Donahue
The Toxic Career of Rand Beers: Kerry's
Drug War Zealot
Gary
Leupp
David Kay's Admission
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has
Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in
Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10,
Morris 0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan
Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's
Revelations and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the
Mafia
January 19, 2004
Justin E. H. Smith
Inside
America's Prisons: From Corrections to Retribution
Richard W. Behan
The GOP, Inc.
Ray McGovern
Bush's
State of the Union: Humility or More Hyperbole?
Werther
SOTUS:
the Stalin Moment of America's Nomenklatura
Phillip Cryan
Media Collusion in Colombia's War
Lee Sustar
A New Strategy to Reverse Labor's Decline?
Arthur Versluis
Great Lakes as Commodity: Privatizing Water
Uri Avnery
Anti-Semitism:
a Practical Manual
Steve Perry
Fresh Crack from Hawkeye State
January 17 / 18, 2004
Fadi Kiblawi and Will
Youmans
The
Use and Abuse of MLK Jr by Israel's Apologists
Joshua Muldavin
and Joseph Nevins
Blaming the Symptoms
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bad Days at Indian Point: Inside America's Most Dangerous Nuclear
Plant
Brian Cloughley
Iron Hammers in Iraq
Saul Landau
Fog of War: Vietnam and Iraq
M. Shahid Alam
Lerner, Said and the Palestinians
Richard Manning
Food Poisoning as Background Noise
Marjorie Cohn
The Guantanamo Concentration Camp
Mike Whitney
Scalia and Opus Dei: Radicals on the Court
Sadik Kassim
Meet Our New Saddam: Islam Karimov
Carol Norris
Arnold
and Bush's Numbers Don't Add Up
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
David Krieger
Imagining MLK Jr at 75
Bruce Jackson
Making War, Making Movies
Ron Jacobs
Revolution in the Air: a review
Richard Edmondson
Rupert Murdoch and My Sister
Richard Forno
Apologizing for Preemption: Evil, Perle and Frum
Poets' Basement
Holt, Mickey Z, Albert & Guthrie
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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February
3, 2004
Don't Throw Me in
That Briar Patch
Our
True Intelligence Failure
By RAHUL MAHAJAN
In the late 19th-century folk classics of Joel
Chandler Harris, there is an episode where the wily Brer Rabbit,
his main character, is caught by Brer Fox. He's stuck to a "Tar
Baby," (the racism of this and virtually everything else
in the late 19th century is palpable) and Brer Fox is going to
eat him up. So Brer Rabbit repeatedly says, "Do anything.
Roast me. Skin me. Eat me. Just don't throw me in that briar
patch." After much importuning, the sadistic Brer Fox throws
him in the briar patch and, of course, Brer Rabbit gets away.
We are now witnessing a replay, with
the Bush administration as Brer Rabbit, the stunning lack of
Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as the Tar Baby, and an odd
coalition of Democratic politicians and the last forlorn remnants
of the middle-of-the-road mainstream press, usually referred
to by conservative ideologues as "the liberal media."
Within weeks of David Kay's report that
the Iraq Survey Group that no WMD had been found (and after many
administration attempts to spin the report, using phrases like
"weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities),
the issue started to snowball and, just as it was gaining momentum,
it was massively diverted into the question of "intelligence
failures." On January 24, Jane Harman, senior Democrat in
the House Intelligence Committee said that Kay's report showed
massive intelligence failures. In Britain, the release of the
Hutton report on January 28, which absolved Tony Blair for lying
about WMD and blamed the BBC for reporting on the lies, shifted
the focus across the Atlantic to intelligence failures as well.
And now George W. Bush is right in the
middle of the briar patch: a "bipartisan commission,"
appointed by himself, that will investigate those intelligence
failures.
And where, in all of this, is that ugly
little three-letter word lie (no, not oil that's a different
article)?
The archipelago of lies about WMD is
now too massive for mortal mind to comprehend, but let's attempt
a synoptic review.
First, a little background. Remember
David Kay's comment that having UNSCOM and IAEA inspectors on
the ground in Iraq in the 1990's was like "crack cocaine"
for the CIA i.e., an extremely powerful source for finding out
about Iraq's WMD, especially when combined with other U.S. intelligence
sources and with the U.S. monitoring equipment that inspectors
were induced to place, illegally, in sites they visited? Well,
the inspectors were withdrawn at Bill Clinton's behest in December
1998 in order to carry out the Desert Fox bombing campaign.
Although it was claimed that Desert Fox
was because of lack of Iraqi cooperation with inspections, this
is untrue. In fact, the UNSCOM report on the inspections that
was sent to the Security Council bears no resemblance to the
preface that Richard Butler wrote, in consultation with the White
House. Looking at the targeting decisions in Desert Fox, as Kenneth
Pollack did in The Threatening Storm, it's clear that Desert
Fox was a "regime change" operation. It was also clear
to analysts that once the inspectors were withdrawn they wouldn't
be let back in.
No intelligence failure there; just a
deliberate decision to sacrifice the best means of ensuring that
Iraq didn't rearm to the policy of "regime change"
(yes, it was the Clinton administration that inaugurated this
policy with regard to Iraq).
Now, on to what Howard Dean would call
the "red meat;" that is, if he actually said any of
this stuff.
Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law, defected
to Jordan briefly in August 1995. He spoke with U.N. inspectors
and revealed enough that the regime then led them to a huge trove
of documents about Iraq's WMD programs. These revelations were
routinely trotted out by the Bush administration as proof that
inspections would not reveal WMD and that the testimony of defectors
was the best evidence. Of course, UNSCOM got Iraq to admit to
having had a biological weapons program (although not to success
in weaponization) in July 1995, so if the admission was prompted
by Kamel's defection in August, Stephen Hawking should be alerted.
More important, however, is this fact:
in 1995, Kamel told inspectors, "I ordered destruction of
all chemical weapons. All weapons biological, chemical, missile,
nuclear were destroyed." All that remained, he said, was
technical documentation and production molds. This testimony
was deliberately covered up for eight years, and only exposed
in a Newsweek article by John Barry on March 3, 2003.
Kamel was no paragon of honesty, although,
given the fact that he wanted to tear down Saddam's regime at
the time, this statement would count as an admission against
interest and should therefore be given weight anyway. Still,
the point is that part of his testimony was used and the rest
concealed. This, of course, is a lie that certain weapons inspectors,
the Clinton administration, and, in part, the media, shared with
the Bush administration.
And how about the much-famed aluminum
tubes, which formed the heart of Colin Powell's February 5, 2003,
presentation to the Security Council? His claims, repeated by
numerous other officials before and after, were that the tubes
must be for use in centrifuges for uranium isotope separation,
not, as the Iraqis claimed, for artillery. In an August 9 Washington
Post article by Walter Pincus and Barton Gellman, one can find
that most U.S. experts were unequivocal that the tubes were not
suitable for centrifuges. In his presentation, Powell adduced
the fact that some of the tubes had an anodized coating as evidence
that they were intended for centrifuges; in fact, experts said,
the coating would have had to be removed for such use.
Also in that speech, Powell claimed that
Iraq had produced four tons of VX nerve gas true, but he left
out the fact that most of that had been destroyed under U.N.
supervision and that the rest had probably degraded into uselessness
since 1991. He also mentioned "classified" documents
found in an Iraqi nuclear scientist's home that provided "dramatic
confirmation" that vital information was being concealed;
in fact, IAEA inspectors said the documents were irrelevant some
administrative, and some from the 1980's. These and other facts
were detailed in an August Associated Press article by Charles
Hanley.
Dick Cheney, who has lied more, and more
consistently, than anyone else, said on March 16, 2003, "We
believe he [Saddam] has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."
If by "we" he meant himself and his own personal psychic
astrologer, perhaps it was a true statement; but no analyst had
ever said anything of the kind. In fact, since nuclear weapons
activities give off radiation, they are very easily detected,
and inspectors had been doing on-site visits for four months
at the time he made this claim.
George W. Bush has done Cheney one better,
twice claiming that the United States went to war because Saddam
wouldn't let inspectors in; the media has treated this as not
really a lie because it's so obviously untrue. He also told us
about the famed attempts to buy uranium from Niger, a claim that
was based on a crude forgery that, an IAEA inspector said, could
be debunked in a few hours on Google (among the errors: the wrong
name for the Nigerien Foreign Minister). He also told us, in
a speech on October 7, 2002, that there was evidence that there
were plans for Iraq's"unmanned aerial vehicles," which
"could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons,"
to be used in "missions targeting the United States."
Experts in Air Force intelligence scoffed at the idea of those
vehicles being able to dispense biological agents in a damaging
way, but more important, the maximum range of the vehicles is
400 miles; perhaps the State Department's geography experts could
have told Bush about the Atlantic Ocean.
And once can go on and on. The exercise
gets boring after a while. In addition to all the details, administration
officials had a consistent pattern of stating as absolute fact
things that were at best the vaguest of conjectures. As was reported
by the U.N. in 1999, there were discrepancies when inspectors
tried to reconcile Iraq's known purchases of chemical agents
and biological growth media with the amount that could be documented
as used or destroyed; this could have stemmed simply from loss
of documents due to two wars and years of sanctions. These were
always presented as hard U.N. claims that Iraq had, for example,
"100 to 500 tons" of chemical weapons agents.
There was also deliberate manipulation
of the truth without outright lying. For example, Powell said
that Iraq was importing magnets "of the same weight"
as those used for centrifuges; in fact, IAEA inspectors had examined
all the magnets and concluded they were unsuitable for use in
centrifuges. He said they had "sources" that said Saddam
had given orders to his field commanders to use the chemical
weapons that Iraq clearly didn't have (and hadn't used in the
Gulf War when they did have them), without saying anything about
the credibility of such sources or the doubts involved.
Bush said, in his famous 16 words, "The
British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought
significant quantities of uranium from Africa." This depends,
as Bill Clinton might say, on the meaning of the word "learned."
If by "learned," you mean "been told" without
any idea of the truth or falsehood of the claim, then this wasn't
a lie. And what about use of the term "Africa?" Apparently,
he couldn't then tell us which of over 50 countries Iraq was
trying to buy uranium from, but we were really supposed to believe
they had hard evidence.
And through it all, there was the constantly
repeated implication that they had far more evidence, they just
couldn't reveal it for "national security" reasons.
In fact, the lies of the administration
are too well established for there to be any doubt. Sometimes
they lied outright; sometimes they came up with a claim and pressured
intelligence analysts to sign off on them. As early as October
2002, Vincent Cannistraro, former CIA head of counterintelligence,
said, "Basically, cooked information is working its way
into high-level pronouncements." Although the CIA didn't
have much of a way to gather useful intelligence on the ground
(contrary to popular opinion, intelligence-gathering is not the
primary function of the CIA the lion's share of the budget goes
to "operations"), there was plenty of intelligence
from U.N. monitoring, both up to 1998 and from November 2002.
There was no intelligence failure, period.
What's happening to the press is very
disturbing. Walter Pincus, who co-wrote the earlier mentioned
article laying out the administration's nuclear lies, more recently
wrote, "even hawks who had backed the administration on
Iraq said it is not credible for the administration to deny that
there was an intelligence failure." As pointed out by Joshua
Micah Marshall, Jim Hoagland, a columnist for the Washington
Post, recently wrote that the Administration is guilty of "credulity,
not chicanery;" i.e., the administration was deceived by
the CIA. Earlier, he wrote "Bush has until now relied little
on the Langley agency for his information on Iraq. There is simply
no way to reconcile what the CIA has said on the record and in
leaks with the positions Bush has taken on Iraq."
Journalists critical of Bush, like Pincus,
and cheerleaders for Bush, like Hoagland, are coming together
around a systematic rewriting of the selling of the Iraq war.
They are being helped along by mainstream Democratic politicians,
always happy to shoot themselves in the head whenever they get
the chance; presidential frontrunner John Kerry has just called
for the resignation of George Tenet, rather than the impeachment
of George Bush.
And, at the end of the day, the result
will be exactly what the administration wants. In Britain, there
was no inquiry into Tony Blair's lies (like the one about Saddam
being able to launch biological and chemical weapons within 45
minutes, now abjured even by the original source); instead, the
BBC was censured for reporting those lies. Heads are rolling,
and the result the administration's dishonesty will be a BBC
that is less critical of dishonest administrations.
Here, there's no BBC to put on the rack;
the broadcast media is so supine that there's no point in disciplining
them. The Bush administration does, however, hate the idea of
impartial analysts who just evaluate the facts and then report
on them so that rightwing ideologues can decide what to do; they
want rightwing ideologues reporting to them on the facts as well.
And this is true even though the CIA is not exactly a group of
bunny-huggers; overthrowing democratically elected governments,
funding murdering thugs like the contras in Nicaragua and many
of the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, and generally causing havoc
and mayhem is their business.
The formation of this new commission
will become the next step in the mission of the administration
to dismantle all institutions, inside and outside government,
and reshape them in the image of the radical right. This is so
even though many of the institutions they're attacking are already
conservative. They've almost finished the job with the broadcast
media; "compassionate conservatism" is about doing
the same with the institutions of the social safety net; they've
done it with corporate lobbyists (see "Welcome to the Machine,"
by Nicholas Confessore); they want to do it with the CIA and
the military; and, scariest of all, they're doing it with the
very infrastructure of democracy, the counting of the vote.
Just as we have seen spectacular recantations
by past insider critics of the Bush administration, like John
DiIulio , Newsweek recently reported on a partial recantation
by It's not as if all of this evolving brouhaha was planned from
the beginning by the administration so that they'd get to the
point of a presidentially-appointed commission to reshape the
CIA. It's just that the administration knows its long-term plans
and is confident in its ability to respond opportunistically
to crises as they arise and to spin them in the right way, knowing,
as it does, that its spin will be uncritically broadcast far
and wide and drown out everything else.
The real intelligence failure is ours,
in allowing all of this to happen. After months of the truth
about the administration's lies coming out, an October poll showed
that 60% of the nation thought of Bush as "honest and trustworthy."
That's an intelligence failure among the media, among the political
opposition, and among all of us who watch passively as a very
dark new world order is ushered in, not with a bang but a whimper.
Rahul Mahajan
is the publisher of Empire
Notes and serves on the Administrative Committee of United
for Peace and Justice, the nation's largest antiwar coalition.
His first book, "The
New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism," has been called
"mandatory reading for anyone who wants to get a handle
on the war on terrorism," and his most recent book, "Full
Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond,"
has been described as "essential for those who wish to continue
to fight against empire." He can be reached at rahul@empirenotes.org
Weekend
Edition Features for February 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
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