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November 18, 2002
Gary Leupp
Terror
War Targets Maoist Exiles
Anthony Gancarski
Secular Crusades
Noam Chomsky
A Modest
Proposal:
Let Iran "Liberate" Iraq
Robert Jensen
World's
Policeman or Bully?
Bill Christison
Why
Bush Wants to Destroy Saddam
Uri Avnery
The Revenge of a Child
November 16 / 17, 2002
Edward Said
Europe vs.
America
Todd May
The Ironies of History
Paul de Rooij
US Aid to Israel
Feeding the Cuckoo
Ben Sonnenberg
Vertov's
Man With a Movie Camera
Gadi Algazi and Azmi Bdeir
Transfer's Real Nightmare
Martin van Creveld
Sharon's Last Option
Walter Brasch
Scoring the US/Iraq War
Michael S. Ladah
The Burning Sails of Baghdad
Don Moniak
An Open Letter on the Augusta Golf
Course Campaign
George Fletcher
Is the UN Security Council Vote on Iraq Illegal?
Ralph Nader
A Tribute to Wellstone
Adam Engel
Mannahatta!
(A Tale of Two Cities)
Bernard, Engel, Dailey, St. Clair
Poets' Basement
November 15, 2002
Anthony Gancarski
Disarming
Christian Soldiers
Kurt Nimmo
Crimes
Plotted in Windowless Rooms: Into the Bush Imperium
Tom Barry
Frontier
Justice
From TR to Bush
Robert Fisk
Bin Laden: Back and in Saudi Arabia?
Chris Floyd
Taking
the Fifth
Bush's Extremist Agenda Goes into Overdrive
Tarif Abboushi
The Political Theology of Tom Delay:
Advocating Crimes Against Humanity?
November 14, 2002
William Hughes
The Mad
World of A.M. Rosenthal
Robert Fisk
War Dance
with Saddam
Ron Lare
Getting 9/11-Baited
War and a Union Election
Russell Mokhiber and
Robert Weissman
Why
Newsweek is Bad for Kids
Jerre Skog
When Big Biz Has Taken Over Everything
The Brave New Nightmare of GATS
Pierre Tristam
Deferral by Default
Lee Sustar
Dockworkers in the Dark
Anis Shivani
"The Doctors' Vote Is Now Up for Grabs"
The Fading Democratic Delusion
Alexander Cockburn
The Anti-War Movement and Its Critics
November 13, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Totem
Thieves
Patrick Cockburn
America's
Saddam Obsession
Anthony Gancarski
Defending
MOM
Rick Giombetti
Wellstone
Assasinated?
The Onus is on the Conspiracy Theorists
Linda Heard
Horseman
Without a Horse
Debate Rages Over an Egyptian TV Series
Ben Roberts
Is It Possible to Underestimate Bush's Intelligence?
November 12, 2002
William Hughes
Three
Strikes Laws
Only the Poor Need Apply
Anthony Gancarski
Rest
in Peace, Jackass!
Ahmad Faruqui
What
Have the Elections Wrought?
Maria Tomchick
A Half-Million
in Florence
Where Was the US Press?
Joanne Mariner
Ashcroft's Narco-Terror War
Qais S. Saleh
A Horseless
Rider, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Imported Bigotry
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's Judges
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by Alexander
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The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
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The
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by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
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November
19, 2002
The
Committee for the Liberation of Iraq:
PR Spinning the Bush Doctrine
by KURT NIMMO
The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq bills
itself as an NGO comprised of a "distinguished group of
Americans" who want to bomb Saddam Hussein out of existence.
Of course, NGO is a misnomer for this particular organization
because its advisory board is stacked with former government
types, including George Shultz. The president of the Committee
is Randy Scheunemann, Trent Lott's former chief national-security
adviser. Last year Scheunemann worked for Donald Rumsfeld as
a consultant on Iraq policy. The Committee chairman is Bruce
P. Jackson, the former vice president of the mega-defense contractor
Lockheed Martin. Jackson chaired the Republican Party Platform's
subcommittee for National Security and Foreign Policy when Bush
ran for president in 2000. Jackson was also big on expanding
the role of NATO -- think of all the new weapons that will be
required -- and headed up a campaign to get Congress to ratify
NATO's eastward expansion. Other NGO types include former Senator
Bob Kerrey and former "Drug Czar" Barry McCaffrey.
You may remember McCaffrey. As a two-star general and Gulf War
"hero," McCaffrey ordered the massacre of hundreds
of retreating soldiers and civilians on the Basra road from Kuwait
to southern Iraq.
On November 15 US Newswire released a
Committee press release. "The Committee was formed to promote
regional peace, political freedom and international security
through replacement of the Saddam Hussein regime with a democratic
government that respects the rights of the Iraqi people and ceases
to threaten the community of nations."
The Committee press release, however,
mentions absolutely nothing about how these objectives will be
achieved. But then, considering who is involved with the Committee,
we don't need much of an explanation -- in essence, the Committee
is a PR front for the Bush attack Iraq policy currently under
way full steam ahead. The Committee is little more than an extension
of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), an "educational"
organization packed with neocons such as William Kristol and
Robert Kagan. PNAC, according to its web page, is "dedicated
to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is
good both for America and for the world; that such leadership
requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment
to moral principle." In other words, Pax Americana installed
unilaterally by way of bunker-buster and cluster bomb diplomacy.
Lest you think PNAC and the Committee are not joined at the hip,
consider who agreed to be an officer of this new (non) NGO --
Gary Schmitt, PNAC's executive director.
The devil is in the details. One such
detail concerns retired four star General Wayne Downing, an erstwhile
lobbyist for the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the CIA bankrolled
"opposition" to Saddam Hussein. It is estimated the
CIA forked out between $60 and $70 million to get the INC rolling
back in the early 90s. Another detail is Ahmed Chalabi, head
of the INC and a former businessman and son of a wealthy banking
family who has not stepped foot inside Iraqi since 1956. In 1992,
according to the BBC, Chalabi was sentenced in absentia by a
Jordanian court to 22 years in prison with hard labor for bank
fraud after the 1990 collapse of Petra Bank, which he had founded
in 1977. Regardless of Chalabi's questionable, Enronesque character
-- as well, the State Department has accused the INC of profligate
spending habits and accounting irregularities -- Scheunemann,
while working for Lott in 1998, drafted the "Iraq Liberation
Act" authorizing 98 million dollars for the INC. Clinton
never got around to spending the money and the Pentagon has since
taken control of it to train the INC. We can only imagine the
sort of training the Pentagon is offering.
Neocons are fond of keeping business
in the family. Many of the current members and associates of
the Committee, PNAC, and The American Enterprise Institute for
Public Policy Research (AEI) were involved with the Committee
for Peace and Security in the Gulf (CPSG), a hard right group
created prior to the Gulf War. CPSG was co-chaired by Bush chicken
hawk Richard Perle along with former New York Democratic Rep.
Stephen Solarz. CPSG teamed up with the Bush Senior administration
to mobilize support for Iraq Attack, version I. According to
Jim Lobe of the Project Against the Present Danger, CPSG received
a sizable grant from the Wisconsin-based Lynde & Harry Bradley
Foundation, a major funder of both PNAC and AEI. Obviously, these
folks like the share the same bed.
The Committee, PNAC, AEI, CPSG -- who
can tell these so-called NGOs apart without a scorecard? In fact,
according to the Sunday Herald, Bush's Pax Americana plan was
sketched out before he was appointed president in 2000. A Bushite
rogue's gallery -- consisting of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby
-- eagerly adopted a document entitled "Rebuilding America's
Defenses: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New Century"
written by PNAC in September 2000. Wolfowitz and Libby had similar
ideas as far back as the Bush I administration but were checked
and enjoined to silence by Bush's top foreign policy aides, Brent
Scowcroft and James Baker. Wolfowitz and Libby were simply ahead
of their time. No such infirmity of purpose exists in the Bush
II White House.
The PNAC plan calls for the US to take
control of the Gulf region with overwhelming and deadly military
force. "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides
the immediate justification," the PNAC document explains,
"the need for a substantial American force presence in the
Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."
In other words, Saddam is little more than an excuse for "maintaining
global US pre-eminence... and shaping the international security
order in line with American principles and interests." After
the PNAC document was leaked to the Sunday Herald, Tam Dalyell,
the British Labor MP, hit the nail right on the head when he
declared, "This is garbage from right-wing think-tanks stuffed
with chicken-hawks -- men who have never seen the horror of war
but are in love with the idea of war. Men like Cheney, who were
draft-dodgers in the Vietnam war."
The Committee is little more than a thinly
disguised PR front for the Bush War Machine. It would seem the
neocons are so arrogant and sanctimonious they don't even bother
to cover their tracks as they march all over the American people
and the Constitution in their long-standing zeal to launch "the
cavalry on the new American frontier," which is to say they
are bent on invading other nations -- specifically, nations that
have their own ideas about what should be done with their natural
resources, finances, and labor.
David North encapsulated the PNAC-neocon
mindset -- and hence, the Bush Doctrine -- perfectly when he
wrote, "The United States government asserts the right to
bomb, invade and destroy whatever country it chooses. It refuses
to respect as a matter of international law the sovereignty of
any other country, and reserves the right to get rid of any regime,
in any part of the world, that is, appears to be, or might some
day become, hostile to what the United States considers to be
its vital interests."
In essence, the Committee, with all its
highfalutin rhetoric about "regional peace, political freedom
and international security," is interested only in an up-to-date
version of colonialism to be imposed on Iraq or any other third
world nation of interest to transnational corporations. After
the bombing and mass murder of innocents is complete in Iraq,
Bush will install a military proconsul -- more than likely General
Tommy Franks in the role of General Douglas MacArthur -- and
eventually Ahmed Chalabi or one of his toadies will be allowed
to supervise a "democratic" Iraq. Like Hamid Karzai
(a former Unocal consultant) in Afghanistan, the handpicked leader
of Iraq will surely require 24-7 bodyguards to protect him from
his own people. No doubt he will break bread with World Bank
President James Wolfensohn and kiss the derriere of transnational
oil corporations. He will have no choice but to allow US military
bases that will be used to attack Iran, Syria, Libya, or any
other nation considering deviance from the Pax Americana agenda
and transnational-at-the-global-feed-trough game plan.
This is the future envisioned by the
Committee, although they choose not to verbalize it in such stark
and unambiguous terms. It is their job to convince the American
people that bombing and terror in the name of democracy against
adventitious enemies is the "moral" thing to do. It
is their task to front the Bush Doctrine as selfless American
magnanimity -- when in fact it is the opposite. It is, finally,
their responsibility to obfuscate when possible or render palatable
when not the all too real and horrible character of the emergent
Bush Doctrine -- wholesale murder, mass starvation, environmental
degradation, and the subjugation of entire continents and populations
in the name of transnational corporate dominion carried forward
by the foreordained Bush junta.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
Today's Features
Gary Leupp
Terror
War Targets Maoist Exiles
Anthony Gancarski
Secular Crusades
Noam Chomsky
A Modest
Proposal:
Let Iran "Liberate" Iraq
Robert Jensen
World's
Policeman or Bully?
Bill Christison
Why
Bush Wants to Destroy Saddam
Uri Avnery
The Revenge of a Child
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