THE MASSES ARE ASSES

Scottie & Me (formerly known as Ari & I)
White House Press Briefing with Scott McLellan - Tuesday, July 29, 2003


Russell Mokhiber: Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defense Secretary, said last week this: “I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq.” And I was wondering if the President agrees with that?

Scott McLellan: We've made our views very clear in terms of foreign terrorists being in that country in terms of countries that maybe could be taking steps to prevent that from happening. So I think the President has made his views very clear on that issue.

Russell Mokhiber: The other question is this – the New York Times reporter, Stephen Kinzer, has just come out with a book called, All the Shah's Men, An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. He documents a CIA operation – Operation Ajax -- which was a coup that overthrew the democratic-elected Prime Minister – Mossadegh. And he makes the following argument -- and I was wondering if you agree to this -- he says, "It is not farfetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York."

Scott McLellan: I appreciate the opportunity to comment on a book that I haven't read, but -- you're asking about the Central Intelligence Agency?

Russell Mokhiber: It was a coup by the United States of a democratically elected leader in Iran.

Scott McLellan: Russell, I haven't even seen that book --

Pentagon Cancels Terrorism Betting Plan

WASHINGTON - Under fire from all sides, the Pentagon on Tuesday dropped plans for a futures market that would have allowed traders to profit from accurate predictions on terrorism, assassinations and other events in the Middle East.

Republicans said they knew nothing about the program and would never have approved it. They called the head of the Pentagon agency overseeing the project to Capitol Hill to answer questions.

Democrats demanded details of any related Pentagon programs, an apology from the Bush administration and the firing of those responsible for the market.

At a hearing where senators criticized the program, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said, "I share your shock at this kind of program." But he also defended the Pentagon office that came up with the project, saying "it is brilliantly imaginative in places where we want them to be imaginative." [...]


Is there any doubt that those that have their hands on the controls are not well?

Memo Warns Of New Plots To Hijack Jets

Terrorists operating in teams of five may be plotting suicide missions to hijack commercial airliners on the East Coast, Europe or Australia this summer, possibly using "common items carried by travelers, such as cameras, modified as weapons," according to an urgent memo sent last weekend to all U.S. airlines and airport security managers.

The "information circular" issued July 26 was drawn from recent intelligence reports that detail the most specific terrorist plots involving passenger aircraft in the United States since four hijacked jetliners were used in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, crashing into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in western Pennsylvania.

"The plan may involve the use of five-man teams, each of which would attempt to seize control of a commercial aircraft either shortly after takeoff or shortly before landing at a chosen airport," the Transportation Security Administration memo said. "This type of operation would preclude the need for flight-trained hijackers." [...]


Cameras modified as weapons? That's incredibly detailed for an intelligence apparatus that 'missed' a busload of young Arab men preparing to simultaneously steal and crash four commercial airliners within the planet's busiest air corridor. Should we hold our collective breath for Condi Rice's "this is a summary of intelligence, not a new warning" clarification?

And even if they didn't make this one up - how bad could it be? We're still at yellow - aren't we?

Sharon Tells Bush Israel Won't Halt Its 'Fence' Project

WASHINGTON, July 29 — Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel today rebuffed pressure from President Bush to halt construction of a security fence on the West Bank and called on Mr. Bush to persuade Palestinian leaders to do more to dismantle terrorist organizations.

After meeting with Mr. Sharon at the White House, Mr. Bush said his commitment to Israel's security was "unshakable." Last week, the president called the fence a "problem" that could undermine efforts to build confidence between the sides; today he referred to it as a "sensitive issue" that he would continue to discuss with Mr. Sharon. [...]



The wall confiscates Palestinian orchards, wells and land while trapping 11,000 Palestinians between the wall and Israel and eliminating the livelihood of 90,000 Palestinians.

The Stage Is Set For Ethnic Cleansing

It seems that for Abu Mazen, talking to George Bush is like trying to nail jello to a tree. Real dialogue is certainly not going to happen, nor does anyone expect it to, this week in Washington, or anywhere else for that matter. Why would Bush, the funder of Israeli atrocities, Sharon's moral support, and international war monger, suddenly become the honest broker he wishes the world believed he was?

PM Abbas was picked to sell-out Palestine during Road Map talks just as Arafat was required to during Oslo. And Bush has not hesitated to let Sharon interpret the Road Map as he likes. We watched the removal of five uninhabited outposts, including fights between angry settlers and Israeli soldiers, which the London Financial Times this week reported were staged.

The Road Map, in plain language, requires the removal of all settlements built since March 2001. And this does not take into account the fact that all settlements are illegal under international law. This is a heavily orchestrated and very depressing stage show.

As we watch the Israeli Occupation Forces continue to incur into Jenin, Nablus, Hebron, and the Gaza Strip, continue its settlement and apartheid wall construction, one wonders how Bush can look Abu Mazen in the eye today, and tell him he must, crack down on terror. Who is writing this script? [...]


Israel has made a great display of removing a few outposts, mostly empty trailers and water tanks. In one case, The New York Times reported a scuffle between supposedly angry settlers and Israeli soldiers removing an outpost, which was interrupted so that the antagonists could share refreshments.
London Financial Times

CommonSense Interview: Noam Chomsky

CommonSense: You have made an analogy between the conflict in Palestine and apartheid South Africa - do you think universities should respond to Israel in the same way they did to South Africa? Specifically, do you think universities should divest from companies doing business in Israel?

Chomsky: The circumstances aren't identical. With South Africa, the crucial thing was not so much university divestment, which was a slow and enduring process, as pressure to ensure that our own government did not participate in criminal activities. There were arms and oil embargoes against South Africa, for example. University divestment was a marginal factor in the scheme of things. In the case of Palestine, the critical demand in the petitions ought to at least be a call for a suspension of arms sales transfers as long as certain minimal conditions are not met. That call has been in the petitions that I signed.

CommonSense: But if students want to be local activists, do you think that calling for university divestment is an effective method? Or should students be concentrating their efforts on national issues?

Chomsky: I think it's a reasonable activity but we shouldn't have any illusions - it's a highly indirect mode of affecting the behavior of states. There is one fundamental difference between South Africa and Israel. While, the US was supporting the apartheid regime, it wasn't the decisive factor in maintaining apartheid. In the case of Israel, however, the United States is the decisive factor in maintaining the occupation. That should affect our choices. They should be directed specifically against the US government. Apartheid was a crime, but you couldn't blame apartheid on decisions made in Washington. On the other hand, you can blame the occupation on decisions made in Washington - that's crucial difference, and it ought to color the way we choose to direct our activities. The occupation looks like it's something happening over there, but it's really something that's happening here. [...]

Leave No Millionaire Behind

For the past two years I have listened carefully to the President, his chief advisors, and the neo-conservative right. All of it has reminded me of a passage in The Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad put it this way:

"Their talk was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight... in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world."

Conrad's words capture the radical frenzy in Washington; they reflect the mood and the moral nullity of the reactionary enterprise that seeks to tear apart the public good. The Bush administration just doesn't get it. No country can sustain itself, much less grow, on a fare of smooth one-liners, rerun ideas, hot-house theories, paranoia, and official policy pronouncements borrowed from Orwell's 1984; where recession is recovery, war is peace and a social policy based on aggressive hostility is compassion. [...]

Tokyo: Out of the Baby Pool?

Ending nearly a half a century of pacifism, Japan responded to Washington's call for help on Saturday by passing a special measure to overlook Tokyo's war-renouncing Constitution. Japan's Parliament passed a bill calling for the deployment of Japan's military, the Self Defense Force, to Iraq on a peacekeeping mission to aid in reconstruction of the war-ravaged country. As a result of the bill, nearly 1000 Japanese troops may be sent to Iraq as early as November and a reconnaissance mission may even be ready to leave for Iraq next month. The special measures bill was being pushed by Prime Minister Junichor Koizumi, of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party. The new law, which critics say runs counter to Japan's Constitution, passed -- but not without a fight.

Opposition lawmakers fought tooth and nail on Saturday to delay the bill which they claim pushes Japan towards a state of remilitarization. The dizzying 11-hour filibuster included various censure motions, a no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister, and an "ox-walk" (meaning a tactic where Japanese politicians walk extremely slowly towards the ballot box). None of the tactics were successful and the opposition, in a final attempt to block the new law, got desperate. The New York Times' Eric Schmitt reports:

"Yelling and scrambling opposition lawmakers surrounded the committee chairman dealing with the Iraq motion but were unable to stop the passage of the bill by the committee and a later plenary session." [...]

Kucinich Proposes Pentagon Budget Cut

OTTUMWA, Iowa - Rep. Dennis Kucinich called for a $60 billion effort to provide universal preschool and proposed paying for the plan with a 15 percent cut in Pentagon spending.

"The Pentagon budget has just gone through the roof," Kucinich said at forum on Sunday. "We need a critical analysis and a real effort to claim back money from the Pentagon."

The Democratic presidential candidate from Ohio didn't specify all the spending cuts he would push, but did single out a missile defense program that would have a dim future should he win the White House. He promised broad cuts. [...]

CIA Probe Points to the Office of Special Plans

Congressman David Obey, D-Wisconsin, also called for a widespread investigation of the Office of Special Plans to find out whether there is any truth to the claims that it willfully manipulated intelligence on the Iraqi threat. During a Congressional briefing July 8, Obey described what he knew about Special Plans and why an investigation into the group is crucial.

"A group of civilian employees in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, all of whom are political employees have long been dissatisfied with the information produced by the established intelligence agencies both inside and outside the Department. That was particularly true, apparently, with respect to the situation in Iraq," Obey said. "As a result, it is reported that they established a special operation within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, which was named the Office of Special Plans. That office was charged with collecting, vetting, and disseminating intelligence completely outside the normal intelligence apparatus. In fact, it appears that the information collected by this office was in some instances not even shared with the established intelligence agencies and in numerous instances was passed on to the National Security Council and the President without having been vetted with anyone other than (the Secretary of Defense).

"It is further alleged that the purpose of this operation was not only to produce intelligence more in keeping with the pre-held views of those individuals, but to intimidate analysts in the established intelligence organizations to produce information that was more supportive of policy decisions which they had already decided to propose." [...]

Burmese sue US oil company
Multinationals on alert as judges are asked to rule that a Californian firm benefited from the junta's 'rape, murder and forced labour'

Twelve Burmese taking legal action in California claim that their country's military government used forced labour and its soldiers employed murder and rape to clear the way for a foreign-funded gas pipeline.

A Los Angeles superior court judge is expected to decide this week whether the case, which may have profound implications for international corporations, can proceed under Californian law. If, as expected, she says yes, the trial is likely to begin in September.

The 12 are suing the Los Angeles company Unocal for damages on the grounds that it benefited from the Burmese activity even if it did not endorse it. [...]

Operation Oily Immunity

During the initial assault on Baghdad, soldiers set up forward bases named Camp Shell and Camp Exxon. Those soldiers knew the score, even if the Pentagon's talking points dismissed any ties between Iraqi oil and their blood.

The Bush/Cheney administration has moved quickly to ensure U.S. corporate control over Iraqi resources at least through the year 2007. The first part of the plan, created by the UN under U.S. pressure is the Development Fund for Iraq which is being controlled by the U.S. and advised by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The second is a recent Bush executive order that provides absolute legal protection for U.S. interests in Iraqi oil.

In May, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1483, which ended sanctions and endorsed the creation of Development Fund for Iraq, to be controlled by Paul Bremer and overseen by a board of accountants, including UN, World Bank, and IMF representatives. It endorsed the transfer of over $1 billion (of Iraqi oil money) from the Oil-for-Food program into the Development Fund. All proceeds from the sale of Iraqi oil and natural gas are also to be placed into the fund. [...]

9/11 report advises U.S. spy chiefs to learn from Israel

WASHINGTON - American intelligence services should take a leaf out of Israel's book and cooperate with its security services to learn how to acquire intelligence from human sources, says the report from the U.S. congressional inquiry into the events of September 11, 2001.

In its recommendations the report calls for a new agency that "should endeavor to learn from both the successes and failures" of Israel's "humint" (human intelligence) strategy. "Their aggressive tactics and inventive use of non-official covers may serve as a useful guide for this new agency," the report continues. "The Israelis have had notable successes in penetrating terrorist organizations and we should learn from their efforts."

The congressional panel of inquiry advises that this new agency, if established, "may also want to consider some level of partnership with the Israeli humint services, given the amount of overlap in the terrorism and proliferation threats to both our national interests." [...]

Niger hits back over uranium claim

The prime minister of the west African state of Niger has challenged Tony Blair to produce evidence for his controversial claim that Iraq tried to buy uranium there.

"If Britain has evidence to support its claim then it has only to produce it for everybody to see," said Prime Minister Hama Hamadou in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph. [...]

11 nations join plan to stop N. Korean ships

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration is preparing to tighten an economic noose around North Korea, even as it considers new talks to persuade the regime of Kim Jong Il to give up nuclear weapons.

The administration has lined up 10 other nations to join a so-called proliferation security initiative. These countries — Japan, Australia, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, the Netherlands, Bulgaria and Spain — have agreed to intercept North Korean ships suspected of carrying weapons and illegal drugs, major sources of hard currency for Kim's government.

Despite administration assurances that it seeks a diplomatic solution to the crisis, State Department officials are not optimistic about the prospects for new talks, which could take place as early as next month in Beijing. [...]

U.S. links Iraq war to 9/11 terror strike
Murky intelligence key: Wolfowitz

WASHINGTON—Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has directly linked the war on Iraq to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, signalling another shift in Washington's defence of a conflict that continues to claim American lives.

Wolfowitz, in a series of interviews on U.S. television networks yesterday, appeared to ignore intelligence reports, which have discredited links between Iraq and Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism.

He sought to defend President George W. Bush's administration against charges that it had misled Americans on the threat posed by deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, saying the government cannot wait for "murky" intelligence to crystallize because it may be too late.

"The battle to secure the peace in Iraq is now the central battle on the war on terrorism," Wolfowitz said on Meet the Press. "Stop and think, if in 2001, or in 2000, or in 1999, we had gone to war in Afghanistan to deal with Osama bin Laden, and we had tried to say it's because he's planning to kill 3,000 people in New York, people would have said, you don't have any proof of that," he said. "I think the lesson of Sept. 11 is that you can't wait until proof after the fact." [...]


Tim Russert suggested that the problem could have been solved without war. Wolfie talked about Khobar Towers -- and Tim jumped in: is Iraq tied to that attack? Wolfie slipped, answering, "Oh, yes" before suddenly realizing he'd made a boo-boo and saying, "No, no" -- and then slipped right back into his song and dance about how horrible Saddam was. - Pundit Pap

Troops Turn Botched Saddam Raid Into A Massacre

BAGHDAD - Obsessed with capturing Saddam Hussein, American soldiers turned a botched raid on a house in the Mansur district of Baghdad yesterday into a bloodbath, opening fire on scores of Iraqi civilians in a crowded street and killing up to 11, including two children, their mother and crippled father. At least one civilian car caught fire, cremating its occupants.

The vehicle carrying the two children and their mother and father was riddled by bullets as it approached a razor-wired checkpoint outside the house.

Amid the fury generated among the largely middle-class residents of Mansur - by ghastly coincidence, the killings were scarcely 40 metres from the houses in which 16 civilians died when the Americans tried to kill Saddam towards the end of the war in April - whatever political advantages were gained by the killing of Saddam's sons have been squandered. A doctor at the Yarmouk hospital, which received four of the dead, turned on me angrily last night, shouting: "If an American came to my emergency room, maybe I would kill him." [...]

Iraqis kill five more US soldiers
Iraqi guerrillas killed a US soldier in a grenade attack south of Baghdad early yesterday morning, bringing the American death toll in 24 hours to five. [...]

France demands Argentine extradition

France has requested the extradition of an Argentine former officer, Alfredo Astiz, over alleged human rights crimes against French nationals during Argentina's military rule. Mr Astiz - known as the "blond angel of death" for his alleged role in Argentina's "Dirty War" - was arrested on Friday. Mr Astiz's detention came after President Nestor Kirchner signed an order allowing officers to be tried abroad - annulling a previous decree banning such extraditions.

A Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzon, has also requested the extradition of a total of 45 former military officers accused of crimes against Spanish nationals. His list includes 1976 coup leader Jorge Videla and Emilio Massera, the head of the Navy School of Mechanics, which was known as a torture centre, as well as Mr Astiz.

Argentine authorities have now arrested 42 former military officers suspected of torture and murder during military rule between 1976 and 1983. Official figures say 9,000 people were kidnapped, tortured and killed in what became known as the Dirty War - but most believe the real number to be closer to 30,000. [...]

EU unfazed by Castro rebuff

The European Union has said it will continue to offer aid to Cuba, despite President Fidel Castro's denunciation of the EU as the United States' "Trojan horse".

"Cuba does not need the help of the European Union to survive," Mr Castro said in a speech on Saturday to mark the 50th anniversary of the revolution he led.

The EU was a "group of old colonial powers historically responsible for slave trafficking, looting and even the extermination of entire peoples", Mr Castro told his audience. [...]

Venezuela Rejects Iraqi Presence at OPEC

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP)--Venezuela, which opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, won't recognize Iraq's delegation to an Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries meeting July 31, the oil minister said Friday.

Rafael Ramirez said no Iraqi official would be allowed to attend any OPEC meeting until an "internationally recognized'' government is in place.

"They can't attend the OPEC meeting,'' he said. "Perhaps some Arab states might meet with them informally.''

Venezuela is the world's No. 5 oil producer. President Hugo Chavez's government condemned the U.S. invasion against Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. [...]

Democracy Now!

And I also venture to say probably the most honest document we've had made public about Iraq was the much maligned 12,000-page statement by none other than Saddam Hussein that he gave before the -- I think it was the end of last year, the statement that we immediately reviled as full of lies, that statement about the extent of weapons of mass destruction. It's probably more accurate than anything this government put out.
- Seymour Hersh, July 24th, 2003

PR Watch on 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' and the Media

Moran's War
During the war in Iraq, Paul Moran, a TV cameraman for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), was killed by a suicide bomber. After his death, his hometown newspaper discovered that Moran also worked for the Rendon Group, a secretive public relations firm that works with the Pentagon. Now additional information has come to light showing that Moran played an important role with the Iraqi National Congress (INC), a PR front created by Rendon, in feeding stories to the press about Iraq's alleged weapons programs from Iraqi defector Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri. "The man who helped orchestrate publicity for al-Haideri was Zaab Sethna, media spokesman for the INC," reports John Hosking. "Sethna spent more than a decade working in and around Iraq. Much of it with his Australian mate Paul Moran. After the INC helped al Haideri escape from Iraq, it was Paul Moran who was called in to do the one television interview that would go around the world."

Miller's 2nd Draft of History
New York Times reporter Judith Miller has begun revising her first draft of history, some two months after her widely criticized stories made the case that evidence of Saddam's unconventional weapons was being found. In a hindsight account written July 20, Miller belatedly concluded that the postwar search for evidence was plagued by "chaos, disorganization, interagency feuds, disputes within and among military units, and shortages of everything. ... To this day, whether Saddam Hussein possessed such weapons when the war began remains unknown." But as William E. Jackson Jr. notes, it was Miller's own stories in April and May that "made it appear a great deal was being discovered that served to demonstrate the validity of the administration's major reasons for a pre-emptive attack. ... Only after Miller's reporting came under fire from reporters within the Times and in the pages of the Post -- among other newspapers and journals -- did the editors couple her with William Broad to write more skeptically about the alleged successes of the WMD search. ... It is puzzling that a star reporter caught in highly misleading reporting on WMDs would be so protected from the consequences of her actions. Disturbing questions are raised when the Times publishes big stories that travel the same winding road as the Bush administration on the very grave matter of why American soldiers were sent off to war."


Daniel Pipes, a recent Bush nominee to the congressionally chartered U.S. Institute of Peace, recently removed WMD-queen Judith Miller from The Middle East Forum's list of experts. Miller was touted as an expert on the inseparable fields of militant Islam and biological warfare. Although they seem to share a common goal in fighting to protect 'American' interests in the Middle East - there is no word yet on whether Miller fears 'brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene.'

Kaiser Sose tackles White House

Billionaire philanthropist and investor George Soros, who favours the legalisation of marijuana for medicinal purposes, is now taking on the Bush Administration.

A full-page advertisement with the headline, "When the Nation Goes to War, the People Deserve the Truth", will appear today in The New York Times, the St Louis Post-Dispatch and the Houston Chronicle. [...]


Verbal Kint: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. Keaton once said, 'I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of him.' Well I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is a billionaire philanthropist.

'History will forgive us'

Release of grisly Hussein photos assailed

Are they proof, or are they pornography?

The images of Saddam Hussein's infamous sons, their faces bloodied and mutilated by the torrent of U.S. bullets and rockets that ended their lives on Tuesday, were released by the White House yesterday and transmitted around the world, over and over again, by eager news media.

While U.S. President George W. Bush and other Washington officials defended the release of the photos yesterday as a necessary proof of success and resolve, others saw it as distasteful gloating, and some pointed out that it was exactly the sort of lurid display that the White House had condemned in the recent past.

When Arabic television networks broadcast photos of dead U.S. soldiers during the Iraq war this year, they were strongly criticized by the White House for overstepping the bounds of decency and violating human rights. [...]


The patients are running the asylum.

The House Majority Leader on the Road Map to Peace

I'm sure there are some in the administration who are smarter than me, but I can't imagine in the very near future that a Palestinian state could ever happen...I can't imagine this president supporting a state of terrorists, a sovereign state of terrorists. You'd have to change almost an entire generation's culture.
- Tom DeLay, July 24, 2003

Won't get fooled again
The war bill soars, while public confidence sinks - now Bush needs the UN more than ever

Iraq is providing the Bush administration with some hard and necessary lessons. One home truth is that frightening the voters only works for a while. George Bush & Co put a great deal of effort into persuading Americans that Saddam Hussein posed a direct threat to home, high school, family SUV and, generally, to the American way of life. Lest we forget, Bush claimed at one point that unmanned aerial vehicles could menace US cities with biological or chemical weapons. Dick Cheney went bigger than big on the supposed Iraqi nuclear threat. Bush adopted the notorious Blair-Campbell "45 minutes to Armageddon" one-liner, as well as the exotic Niger yellowcake fairytale.

Yet nearly two years after 9/11; after two all-out wars; after a deal of extra-judicial killing and illegal incarceration; after attorney-general John Ashcroft's faith-led subversion of the US constitution; and three months after Saddam joined Osama bin Laden and the Taliban's Mullah Omar in the displaced-but-not-deleted category - do Americans really feel any safer? [...]


Although the hawks have shifted the 'war on terrorism'-rhetoric from 'security' to 'liberation' - many around the world - including the people of Iraq - just aren't buying it.

"I'm not concerned about weapons of mass destruction. I'm concerned about getting Iraq on its feet. I didn't come [to Iraq] on a search for weapons of mass destruction."
– Paul Wolfowitz, July 21, 2003


"I think all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq."
– Paul Wolfowitz, July 21, 2003


And from the Septic Tank, Channeling Chauncey:


"You don't build a democracy like you build a house. Democracy grows like a garden. If you keep the weeds out and water the plants and you’re patient, eventually you get something magnificent."
– Paul Wolfowitz, July 22, 2003


"You must tend to the garden, plant in the spring and harvest in the fall. In the winter, the garden dies and you must wait for spring."
– Chauncey Gardner, Being There


Coincidence?

Poll shows many Germans see U.S. behind Sept 11

BERLIN, July 23 (Reuters) - Almost one in three Germans below the age of 30 believes the U.S. government may have sponsored the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, according to a poll published on Wednesday. [...]

9/11 report: No Iraq link to al-Qaida

WASHINGTON, July 23 (UPI) -- The report of the joint congressional inquiry into the suicide hijackings on Sept. 11, 2001, to be published Thursday, reveals U.S. intelligence had no evidence that the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein was involved in the attacks, or that it had supported al-Qaida, United Press International has learned.

"The report shows there is no link between Iraq and al-Qaida," said a government official who has seen the report.

Former Democratic Georgia Sen. Max Cleland, who was a member of the joint congressional committee that produced the report, confirmed the official's statement.

Asked whether he believed the report will reveal that there was no connection between al-Qaida and Iraq, Cleland replied: "I do ... There's no connection, and that's been confirmed by some of (al-Qaida leader Osama) bin Laden's terrorist followers." [...]

Privatization and Neo-feudalism

Recently, and within a brief time span, observers in many quarters have expressed their understanding that an unstated strategy behind the huge Republican tax cut has been to bring the U.S. government to its financial knees, thereby making it unable to cover the Right’s hated social programs - e.g., Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid - and the administration of our public domain.

Paul Krugman, in a May 27 article in the New York Times titled "Stating the Obvious," wrote that "the gimmicks used to make an $800-billion-plus tax cut carry an official price tag of only $320 billion are a joke, yet the cost without the gimmicks is so large that the nation can't possibly afford it while keeping its other promises; ... The people now running America aren't conservatives: they're radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need."

Two days later, Peronet Despeignes, reporting in the Financial Times of London, wrote, "The Bush administration has shelved a report commissioned by the Treasury that shows the US currently faces a future of chronic federal budget deficits totaling at least $44,200 trillion (the deficit is currently at about $6 trillion) in current US dollars."

The next day, on his public television show "Now," Bill Moyers was blunt. The Bush administration, he said, kept news of this impending debt from the public "lest it throw the fear of God into Congress and the financial markets and cost them the tax cut for the rich." Moyers went on to say that "we are watching the country’s future slip deeper and deeper into a black hole of red ink."

And two days after that, Noam Chomsky, in an interview on C-Span televised on June 1, stated flatly that the tax cut was calculated to lead to a "fiscal train wreck." [...]

A Kind of Fascism Is Replacing Our 'Democracy'

No administration before George W. Bush's ever claimed such sweeping powers for an enterprise as vaguely defined as the "war against terrorism" and the "axis of evil." Nor has one begun to consume such an enormous amount of the nation's resources for a mission whose end would be difficult to recognize even if achieved.

Like previous forms of totalitarianism, the Bush administration boasts a reckless unilateralism that believes the United States can demand unquestioning support, on terms it dictates; ignores treaties and violates international law at will; invades other countries without provocation; and incarcerates persons indefinitely without charging them with a crime or allowing access to counsel.
[...]

Xymphora

The current scandal over the series of lies told by the Bush Administration to trick Congress and the American people into the utterly disastrous attack on Iraq has numerous parallels with the Watergate scandal:

1) The most obvious parallel is how this scandal is starting to feel like the Watergate scandal. We are seeing the same constant series of small developments, each one contradicting the latest attempt by the Bush Administration to lie itself out of trouble. Each day, you can read the newspaper articles and expect to see a new revelation damaging to Bush. Even more reminiscent of Watergate, many of these articles are appearing in the moribund Washington Post, which had become a sad mockery of its former self having fallen to the status of a mere government propaganda sheet. We are also seeing exactly the same attempts at holding back the tide by Republican legislators, failing each time due to the unremitting series of damaging leaks. We even now have a political murder in the death of David Kelly, which reminds me of the mysterious plane crash of the airliner containing Dorothy Hunt, wife of Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, who immediately got the message and stopped being difficult and pled guilty. Kelly's death will ensure that poodle Tony won't have to put up with any more annoying leaks.

2) At a deeper level, the Watergate matter only became important when Nixon, in a stupid and clumsy move, tried to blackmail the CIA into helping him out of the problem by threatening to reveal what he knew about the CIA's role in the JFK assassination (what Nixon referred to as 'the whole Bay of Pigs thing'). This brought the wrath of the 'Company' down upon him, and effectively sealed his fate. Karl Rove has made a similar mistake in having Tenet make the humiliating admission that the inclusion of the Niger uranium allegations in the State of the Union address was entirely the fault of the CIA (particularly galling in that the CIA did everything it could to keep the Niger allegations from being used). This was a massive tactical error for two reasons:


◙ it angered the CIA, which knows where all the bodies are buried and has an unsurpassed mastery of the slow leak of damaging information to select journalists; and

◙ by having the admission of responsibility happen so soon, Rove has removed any reason for the CIA to lie, which means that everything the CIA says on this issue has 100% credibility (so when Joseph of the Bush Administration directly contradicts Foley of the CIA on the key point, and Foley has absolutely no reason to lie, who are you going to believe?).


The romanticized notion that journalists cracked open the Watergate case has been replaced by the idea that the leakers of information controlled the whole process of the downfall of Nixon. Instead of being some kind of victory for the 'system', it appears that Watergate may just have been another in the series of coup d'etats which plague American politics, with Nixon being removed because of fears that his attempts at being a great President might have led him to end the Cold War twenty years early, thus causing great harm to the military-industrial complex. In the current case, insulting the CIA may have triggered the series of leaks, but we have to delve deeper into Watergate parallels to understand more of the symmetry.

[...]


The world's lone superpower cannot afford to have the 'war on terrorism' end.

Face The Nation - July 20, 2003

Bob Schieffer: Senator, you, of course, are a candidate for the Democratic nomination. But I want to focus mostly today on intelligence matters, because last year you were the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That committee is coming out with a report this week. You did months of investigation. You were looking into what happened before 9/11, what happened after 9/11, could we have done a better job. Is this report going to put out the information that the American people need to know about that?

Senator Bob Graham: Not completely. The report is approximately 800 pages long, but there are significant portions of the report which have been classified, meaning that they will not be available to the American people. I think in many of those most important sections, the classification had more to do with the agencies wishing to avoid embarrassment by the disclosure of their actions or inactions rather than the protection of some national security interests.

[...]

Katty Kay: Senator, can we talk about the current weapons of mass destruction argument that has been brewing all week here in Washington?

It does seem from the latest reports that both the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency had serious doubts about this issue of whether Iraq was trying to buy yellow cake or uranium from Niger; yet it made it into the State of the Union address.

Does it seem to you then that there was somebody within the White House that may have wanted that information to get out there, even though the CIA and the State Department had their doubts about it?

Graham: Well, let me first say I voted against the resolution that authorized war in Iraq, not because of the issues of Niger but because I thought it would take our focus away from the principal enemy to the people of the United States, al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups, and that is precisely what has happened. They have been allowed to regroup, regenerate, and now conduct a series of terrorist attacks in one of which seven Americans were killed.

As to the role of the White House in increasing the sense of the imminence of an attack by Saudi Arabia, the figure that is interesting to me is the vice president. The vice president is the one who went to the CIA on several occasions. He asked specifically for additional information on the Niger-Iraq connection. The United States sent an experienced ambassador, who came back after a full review with a report that these were fabricated documents. You cannot tell me that the vice president didn't receive the same report that the CIA received, and that the vice president didn't communicate that report to the president or national security advisers to the president.

Schieffer: Well...

Graham: So I have to believe that the president knew or should have known that this information had been classified as unreliable by the CIA.

Schieffer: We're just about out of time, but one quick question. Did your committee find any connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda?

Graham: No, certainly no connection as to the events of September the 11th, and very limited evidence as to other relations before or after September the 11th. In fact, there was an enmity between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein based on their quite different views of the future of the Islamic world.

Blind Imperial Arrogance - Vile Stereotyping of Arabs by the U.S. Ensures Years of Turmoil

The great modern empires have never been held together only by military power. Britain ruled the vast territories of India with only a few thousand colonial officers and a few more thousand troops, many of them Indian. France did the same in North Africa and Indochina, the Dutch in Indonesia, the Portuguese and Belgians in Africa. The key element was imperial perspective, that way of looking at a distant foreign reality by subordinating it in one's gaze, constructing its history from one's own point of view, seeing its people as subjects whose fate can be decided by what distant administrators think is best for them. From such willful perspectives ideas develop, including the theory that imperialism is a benign and necessary thing.

For a while this worked, as many local leaders believed — mistakenly — that cooperating with the imperial authority was the only way. But because the dialectic between the imperial perspective and the local one is adversarial and impermanent, at some point the conflict between ruler and ruled becomes uncontainable and breaks out into colonial war, as happened in Algeria and India. We are still a long way from that moment in American rule over the Arab and Muslim world because, over the last century, pacification through unpopular local rulers has so far worked.

At least since World War II, American strategic interests in the Middle East have been, first, to ensure supplies of oil and, second, to guarantee at enormous cost the strength and domination of Israel over its neighbors. [...]

After 9/11, US Planes Began Softening Iraqi Defenses

As early as the autumn of 2001, US military authorities took steps to increase surveillance of southern Iraq and then to systematically bomb Iraq's command posts, air defense weapons, and communication links in anticipation of possible war, according to the American general who commanded the air campaign.

The intensified airstrikes, which got underway in earnest in the summer of 2002, were justified publicly at the time as a response to increased Iraqi targeting of US pilots patrolling a no-fly zone. But providing new details about how the operation -- dubbed ''Southern Focus'' -- was conceived and executed, Lieutenant General T. Michael ''Buzz'' Moseley said the fact that the United States had put more planes in the air over Iraq may have prompted the Iraqis to shoot more.

''So there is a chicken and an egg thing here,'' he said in an interview.

Moseley said the attacks, which were portrayed as enforcement of UN resolutions, eliminated the need for a long bombing campaign. They ultimately afforded General Tommy Franks, the top US commander in the region, greater flexibility in moving special operations forces and conventional ground troops into Iraq early when the decision was made to invade, Moseley said.

Although Bush administration officials have maintained that war was not inevitable and the decision to invade Iraq was not made until March this year, Moseley's comments make clear that military commanders started planning for stepped-up action soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and launched an operation to pick apart Iraq's air defense system about nine months before the war. [...]

Cheney Energy Task Force Documents Feature Map of Iraqi Oilfields

(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption and abuse, said today that documents turned over by the Commerce Department, under court order as a result of Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit concerning the activities of the Cheney Energy Task Force, contain a map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as 2 charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and "Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts." [...]

Weapons expert had slashed wrist

Police have confirmed that the expert at the centre of the Iraq dossier row bled to death from a cut to his wrist, as Tony Blair comes under increasing pressure over the affair.

Dr. David Kelly, 59, was the mole behind a BBC report that Downing Street communications director Alastair Campbell "sexed up" a dossier setting out the case for war.

A senior officer said a knife and a packet of painkillers had been found close to where his body was discovered in woodland near his home in Oxfordshire on Friday. [...]

War, Tax Cuts, and the Deficit

For months, analysts have been saying that the deficit for the current year is likely to hit $400 billion and that the deficit for the coming year, fiscal year 2004, will likely be even higher. Recently, the Congressional Budget Office confirmed the first of these fears, writing, "[we now project] that the federal government is likely to end fiscal year 2003 with a deficit of more than $400 billion, or close to 4 percent of gross domestic product."

On April 24, the President said in a speech in Canton, Ohio that the war and the recession caused those deficits. He declared "Now, you hear talk about deficits. And I'm concerned about deficits. I'm sure you are as well. But this nation has got a deficit because we have been through a war." Three sentences later, the President added: "And we had an emergency and a recession, which affected the revenue growth of the U.S. Treasury."

Yet the cost of war, though by no means trivial, is responsible for only a small share of the deficits we face. The President's tax cuts are a much more significant cause. Congressional Budget Office data indicate that in 2003 and 2004, the cost of enacted tax cuts is almost three times as great as the cost of war, even when the cost of increases in homeland security expenditures, the rebuilding after September 11, and other costs of the war on terrorism — including the action in Afghanistan — are counted as "war costs," along with the costs of the military operations and subsequent reconstruction in Iraq. [...]

The Next Debate: Al Qaeda Link

In all the debate over the disputed claims in President Bush's State of the Union address, we must not forget to scrutinize an equally important, and equally suspect, reason given by the administration for toppling Saddam Hussein: Iraq's supposed links to terrorists.

The invasion of Iraq, after all, was billed as Phase II in the war on terror that began after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But was there ever a credible basis for carrying that battle to Iraq?

Don't misunderstand — we should all be glad to see the Iraqi people freed from Saddam Hussein's tyranny, and the defeat of Iraq did spell the demise of the world's No. 4 state sponsor of international terrorism (Iran, Syria and Sudan all have more blood on their hands in the last decade). But the connection the administration asserted between Iraq and Al Qaeda, the organization that made catastrophic terrorism a reality, seems more uncertain than ever.

In making its case for war, the administration dismissed the arguments of experts who noted that despite some contacts between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden's followers over the years, there was no strong evidence of a substantive relationship. As members of the National Security Council staff from 1994 to 1999, we closely examined nearly a decade's worth of intelligence and we became convinced, like many of our colleagues in the intelligence community, that the religious radicals of Al Qaeda and the secularists of Baathist Iraq simply did not trust one another or share sufficiently compelling interests to work together.

But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised that the Bush administration had "bulletproof evidence" of a Qaeda-Iraq link, and Secretary of State Colin Powell made a similar case to the United Nations. Such claims now look as questionable as the allegation that Iraq was buying uranium in Niger. [...]

Iraq row over fate of seized scientists

American efforts at finding top Iraqi scientists who can attest to Saddam Hussein hiding weapons of mass destruction have turned out to be as fruitless as the search for the weapons themselves.
The continued detention of leading Iraqi scientists and other officials by US forces is swiftly turning into a major human rights row.

Washington officials hoped that, with Saddam's removal, the people who had intimate knowledge of Iraq's secret arms industry would give a different story from the denials given while he still held sway.

But as pressure intensifies on President George Bush and Tony Blair to prove Iraq had WMD, the inability to produce a single scientist from the former regime to confirm the assertions about an alleged threat is becoming an embarrassment. [...]

Real Special: Office of Special Plans Behind Phony 'Intelligence'

When George Tenet, the director of the CIA, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee last week about dubious intelligence data on the Iraqi threat that made it into President Bush’s State of the Union address in January, he said an ad-hoc committee called the Office of Special Plans, set up Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and other high-profile hawks rewrote the intelligence information on Iraq that the CIA gathered and gave it to White House officials to help Bush build a case for war, according to three Senators on the intelligence committee.

Tenet told the Intelligence Committee that his own spies at the CIA determined that much of the intelligence information they collected on Iraq could not prove that the country was an imminent threat nor could they find any concrete evidence that Iraq was stockpiling a cache of chemical and biological weapons. But the Office of Special Plans, using Iraqi defectors from the Iraqi National Congress as their main source, rewrote some of the CIA’s intelligence to say, undeniably, that Iraq was hiding some of the world’s most lethal weapons. Once the intelligence was rewritten, it was delivered to the office of National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, where it found its way into various public speeches given by Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, the Senators said. [...]

Breaking faith with the troops
Extending tours in Iraq could be breaking point

Last week, the Pentagon informed the 3rd Infantry Division troops in Iraq that they would not be going home on the dates previously promised. In fact, they will be extended in their duty "indefinitely."

Errors of judgment and planning have been made in the Iraq operation, but I can think of no other error so grave. What this means to the average soldier, cooked by the Iraqi summer sun under his flak jacket and helmet, is that there's no longer any schedule against which he can hope for escape.

This Baghdad hideousness, this confusion and the damned heat, will go on and on. It means, further, that the U.S. government, which acclaimed the troops as heroes a few months back, has failed in its predictions about the war and is solving the problem by leaving them there to pay for the failure. [...]


It gives them a little more time to enjoy the 'flowers and candy'.

Bush Uranium Lie Is Tip of the Iceberg
Press should expand focus beyond "16 words"

Bush's use of the Niger forgeries has received considerable media attention in recent days. Much of this reporting has been valuable, and some outlets have broadened the inquiry beyond one passage in a speech. The Washington Post's Walter Pincus, for example, suggests that the uranium claim remained in the State of the Union address because "almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq."

Much media coverage, however, has focused narrowly on the Niger incident, putting the press is in danger of ignoring the most important question the story raises: Does the uranium claim indicate a larger pattern of deceptive claims made about Iraq? At minimum, the following assertions made by the Bush administration also deserve media scrutiny:

Aluminum tubes: In the State of the Union address and elsewhere, the White House has claimed that Iraq was seeking to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes to use in processing uranium, tubes Bush said would be "suitable for nuclear weapons production." But a report in the Washington Post months before Bush's address noted that leading scientists and former weapons inspectors seriously questioned the administration's explanation-- pointing out that the tubes, which would be difficult to use for uranium production, were more plausibly intended for artillery rockets. The Post also noted charges that the "Bush administration is trying to quiet dissent among its own analysts over how to interpret the evidence." Commendably, some reporters, like NBC's Andrea Mitchell, have questioned the aluminum tubes claim in recent reporting about Bush's State of the Union address.

Iraq/Al Qaeda links: When Bush announced the end of hostilities in Iraq in a May 1 speech aboard the USS Lincoln, he said of the defeated Iraqi regime: "We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda." While a Saddam Hussein/Osama bin Laden connection was one of the administration's early justifications for going to war, it has produced no evidence to demonstrate this link exists. There is evidence, however, that the administration was deeply invested in proving such a tie, as former Gen. Wesley Clark attested recently on Meet the Press. Yet media accounts of Bush's USS Lincoln speech hardly raised an eyebrow over this attempt to keep the Iraq/Al Qaeda link alive.

The trailers: Bush presented the discovery of two trailers in Iraq as proof that Iraq possessed banned weapons: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories," he told Polish TV. "They're illegal. They're against the United Nations resolutions, and we've so far discovered two. And we'll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven't found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they're wrong, we found them." But serious questions had been raised within the administration about whether these trailers had anything to do with biological weapons-- doubts that soon emerged in a New York Times article. No evidence has been put forward confirming that the trailers were designed for anything other than the production of hydrogen for artillery balloons, as captured Iraqis had said.

Weapons Inspections: More recently, Bush has flagrantly misrepresented the history of the prewar conflict with Iraq over weapons inspections, telling reporters on July 14, "We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." In fact, after a Security Council resolution was passed demanding that Iraq allow inspectors in, they were given complete access to the country. The Washington Post, describing Bush's remarkable statement, could only say that his assertion "appeared to contradict the events leading up to war this spring." Joe Conason took note of "the press corps' failure to report his stunning gaffe. The sentence quoted above doesn't appear in today's New York Times report, for example."

Powell's U.N. address: Some of the current reporting over the Niger uranium forgery notes that Colin Powell was less confident about the story, as evinced by the fact that he did not include the claim in his February 5 address to the United Nations. But Powell's speech had problems of its own. As pointed out by Gilbert Cranberg, Powell embellished an intercepted conversation about weapons inspections between Iraqi officials to make it sound more incriminating, changing an order to "inspect the scrap areas and the abandoned areas" to a command to "clean out" those areas. He also added the phrase "make sure there is nothing there," a phrase that appears nowhere in the State Department's official translation. Further, Powell relied heavily on the disclosure of Iraq's pre-war unconventional weapons programs by defector Hussein Kamel, without noting that Kamel had also said that all those weapons had been destroyed.

Other pre-war deceptions: Even when administration deceptions have been exposed by prominent mainstream outlets, the media in general tend not to recall them or draw connections. In October 2002, in a notable front-page article titled "For Bush, Facts Are Malleable", Washington Post reporter Dana Milbank noted two dubious Bush claims about Iraq: his citing of a United Nations International Atomic Energy report alleging that Iraq was "six months away" from developing a nuclear weapon; and that Iraq maintained a growing fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used, in Bush's words, "for missions targeting the United States." While these assertions "were powerful arguments for the actions Bush sought," Milbank concluded they "were dubious, if not wrong. Further information revealed that the aircraft lack the range to reach the United States" and "there was no such report by the IAEA." But recent media discussions of Bush's credibility-- including in the Washington Post-- have rarely mentioned these examples.

ARI & I
White House Press Briefing with Ari Fleischer - Monday, July 14, 2003


Note from Russell Mokhiber: Today was Ari Fleischer's last White House press briefing. He's leaving the White House to start a consulting firm that will advise corporate executives on how to handle the news media. Starting tomorrow, the new White House Press Secretary will be Scott McClellan. I'm hoping to continue to this feature under the headline: "Scottie and Me."


Russell Mokhiber: Ari, in the 2002 election campaign, the Republican Party took in $7.2 million from convicted criminals. Is the President okay with his party taking millions of dollars from convicted criminals? Ari

Ari Fleischer: I have no idea what you are referring to -

Russell Mokhiber: I'm referring to, let me tell you -

Ari Fleischer: Obviously, if money is received - both parties from people who are later found out to be people who shouldn't be giving money - then it gets returned.

Russell Mokhiber: These are actually major corporations convicted of crimes. ADM gave $1.7 million, Pfizer $1.1 million, Chevron $875,000. Is the President okay with those companies giving direct contributions to the Republican Party after being convicted of crimes?

Ari Fleischer: Russell, as you know, the Presidential campaign takes no money from corporations.

Russell Mokhiber: I'm talking about the party.

Ari Fleischer: Well, you'll have to address your questions to the party.

Russell Mokhiber: Well, as the titular head of the party, is he okay with the party taking money from convicted criminals?

Ari Fleischer: I don't know what information you have where you can say that this corporation is a criminal.

Russell Mokhiber: Convicted - they pled guilty to crimes.

Ari Fleischer: Were the crimes of such a nature that they are no longer in existence?

Russell Mokhiber: ADM pled guilty to one of the most massive antitrust crimes and paid a $100 million fine.

Ari Fleischer: I think you need to address any questions about specific companies with the specifics in mind, and if that company is still doing business and is still in operation, that means it is still in operation with the law, and every case is individual, and the party decides about whether the money needs to be returned or not. But I don't have specifics.

Russell Mokhiber: One follow-up.

Ari Fleischer: Go ahead, Russell.

Russell Mokhiber: One follow up. It's actually a broad philosophical question. Is the President okay with taking money from convicted criminals?

Ari Fleischer: I informed you that the President does not take money from corporations.

Russell Mokhiber: No, I'm talking about - as titular head of the party, is he okay with the party taking money from convicted criminals. For example, in Enron -

Ari Fleischer: I just have to differ with your notion that because a company has been fined -

Russell Mokhiber: No, they pled guilty to crimes. They pled guilty to crimes.

Ari Fleischer: Even so - I don't know what specifics you are referring to - that that company is a convicted criminal.

Russell Mokhiber: If you plead guilty to a crime, you are a criminal.

Ari Fleischer: Does that mean that they need to go out of business?

Russell Mokhiber: I'm asking - should the Republican Party take money from convicted criminals?

Ari Fleischer: You need to address your question to the Republican Party.

Russell Mokhiber: But he's the titular head of the party.

Ari Fleischer: And the titular head of the party refers you to the party.


Ari goes out in style. No word yet on his fee for advising convicted criminals moonlighting as corporate executives.

Afghan Poppies Proliferate
As Drug Trade Widens, Labs and Corruption Flourish

The drug trade in Afghanistan is growing more pervasive, powerful and organized, its corrupting reach extending to all aspects of society, according to dozens of interviews with international and Afghan anti-narcotics workers, police, poppy farmers, government officials and their critics.

Afghanistan, the world's largest opium producer last year, appears poised to produce another bumper crop. In rural areas where wheat has historically been the dominant crop, fields of brilliant red, pink and white poppies are proliferating. Many poor farmers, who complain that the Afghan government and other countries have failed to ease their economic woes through legal means, say that they are growing illegal opium poppies for the first time.

At the same time, drug laboratories where raw opium is processed into morphine or heroin -- once rare in Afghanistan -- are sprouting at an unprecedented rate, police and anti-narcotics workers say. Many authorities appear less inclined to combat new drug syndicates than to share in their profits. The crude but money-making factories are largely condoned by elders, unmolested by police and guarded by militiamen and their commanders. [...]


Opium was banned by the Taliban in 1999 - and a mere 1,685 hectares were cultivated the following year, according to the US State Department. However, last year a total of 30,750 hectares were harvested, helping restore Afghanistan to its role as the world's number one exporter of heroin precursors. Although the Washington Post continues the 'Operation Enduring Freedom' rhetoric by implying the Taliban had banned poppy cultivation in order to profit from soaring Opium prices - the truth of the matter is that Wall Street's addiction to liquidity makes interrupting 70% of the global heroin market difficult to sustain.

The Lost Decade
They Were Promised a Brighter Future, But in the 1990s the World's Poor Fell Further Behind

Taking issue with those who have argued that the "tough love" policies of the past two decades have spawned the growth of a new global middle class, the report [UN's annual human development report] says the world became ever more divided between the super-rich and the desperately poor.

The richest 1% of the world's population (around 60 million) now receive as much income as the poorest 57%, while the income of the richest 25 million Americans is the equivalent of that of almost 2 billion of the world's poorest people. In 1820 western Europe's per capita income was three times that of Africa's; by the 90s it was more than 13 times as high.

The UN said the events of September 11 had created a "genuine consensus" that poverty was the world's problem, but urged the west to abandon the one-size-fits-all liberalization agenda foisted on poor countries.

Matthew Lockwood, head of UK Advocacy Team, ActionAid, said: "The shocking truth is that the poor are getting poorer. Leaders, in rich and poor countries alike, are not taking poverty seriously enough.

"You don't solve this problem by making the leaders of poor countries accountable to their rich-country counterparts. They need to be accountable to their own citizens. Poor people must have a voice. [...]

India Asks U.S. To Extradite Former Union Carbide Chairman

WASHINGTON - The International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal (ICJB) and survivors organizations have prompted the Indian government to serve a longstanding notice to the U.S. government to extradite former Union Carbide Chairman Warren Anderson.

Anderson is wanted in the Bhopal Court for his primary role in the 1984 gas disaster in Bhopal that has claimed more than 20,000 lives to date.

During the early hours of December 3, 1984, methyl isocyanate gas leaked from a storage tank at a Union Carbide pesticide manufacturing facility in Bhopal. As it escaped, the gas moved across adjacent communities killing thousands of people and injuring many thousands more. According to the Indian government, some 3,800 people died, but others estimate that as many as 8,000 people were killed by the gas.

Billed as the world's worst industrial disaster, the Bhopal tragedy injured 500,000 people. Survivors and their children are impoverished and continue to suffer drastic long term effects in the absence of economic rehabilitation measures and appropriate medical care. [...]

White House 'Lied About Saddam Threat'

At a press conference yesterday, [former director in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence] Gregory Thielmann said that, as of March 2003, when the US began military operations, "Iraq posed no imminent threat to either its neighbors or to the United States".

In one example, Mr Thielmann said a fierce debate inside the White House about the purpose of aluminum tubes bought by Baghdad had been "cloaked in ambiguity".

While some CIA analysts thought they could be used for gas centrifuges to enrich uranium, the best experts at the energy department disagreed. But the national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, said publicly that they could only be used for centrifuges.

Mr Thielmann also said there was no significant pattern of cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida. He added: "This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude ... 'We know the answers - give us the intelligence to support those answers'." [...]

Kurtzer says Palestinian PM is a 'relatively weak man'

United States Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer has called Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) a "relatively weak man" who tends to "run away from problems."

Speaking Monday evening to some 150 rabbis and Jewish lay leaders in Jerusalem, Kurtzer said Abbas is "doing a little bit better," in part due to U.S. pressure.

American support of Abbas is secondary to the U.S. desire to remove Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat from power, Kurtzer added. "Our objective was not to empower an individual named Abu Mazen; our objective was to disempower an individual named Arafat." [...]

Into Africa
How Iraq begat Liberia

Liberia poses no threat to American security. It possesses no weapons of mass destruction, and it would be foolish to use them against us if it did. It is not allied with Osama bin Laden, it has never attacked the United States, and most Pentagon officials are reportedly opposed to sending soldiers there. If they are deployed, our troops are hardly equipped to transform it into a peaceful constitutional republic.

So clearly, there's plenty of precedent for invading it. [...]

Pants On Fire

"You will get different estimates about precisely how close he is. We do know that he is actively pursuing a nuclear weapon. We do know that there have been shipments going -- into Iraq, for instance, of aluminum tubes that really are only suited to -- high-quality aluminum tools that are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs...The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't what the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice - CNN's Late Edition - Sept 2002

"After the Iraq war, Desert Storm, after they invaded Kuwait and did what they did, all the damage, we went in and were able to find out that they were within six months to a year of having a nuclear weapon...If you go back to September 11th, we lost 3,000 innocent men, women and children. Well, if you think that's a problem, imagine, imagine, a September 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It's not 3,000; it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children."
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - CBS's Face The Nation - Sept 2002

"Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
President George Bush - Cincinnati, Ohio - Oct 2002

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
President George Bush - State of the Union Address - Jan 2003

"Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 different countries, even after inspections resumed. These tubes are controlled by the Nuclear Suppliers Group precisely because they can be used as centrifuges for enriching uranium."
Secretary of State Colin Powell - UN Security Council presentation - Feb 2003

"Since my last update to the council, the primary technical focus of IAEA field activities in Iraq has been on resolving several outstanding issues related to the possible resumption of efforts by Iraq to enrich uranium through the use of centrifuge. For that purpose, the IAEA assembled a specially qualified team of international centrifuge manufacturing experts...Drawing on this information, the IAEA has learned that the original tolerance for the 81-millimeter tubes were set prior to 1987 and were based on physical measurements taken from a small number of imported rockets in Iraq's possession...the IAEA team has concluded that Iraq efforts to import these aluminum tubes were not likely to have been related to the manufacture of centrifuge, and moreover that it was highly unlikely that Iraq could have achieved the considerable redesign needed to use them in a revived centrifuge program."

"With regard to uranium acquisition, the IAEA has made progress in its investigation into reports that Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger in recent years...Based on thorough analysis, the IAEA has concluded with the concurrence of outside experts that these documents which formed the basis for the report of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic...After three months of intrusive inspections, we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq."
IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei - UN Security Council report - Mar 2003

"We know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong."
Vice President Richard Cheney - NBC's Meet the Press interview - Mar 2003

So when did the White House discover they were fakes?

On June 8th, Condi Rice conceded that the documents were fraudulent but told Tim Russert that the White House hadn’t known before the speech. "Maybe someone knew down in the bowels of the Agency [i.e., the CIA], but no one in our circles knew that there were doubts and suspicions that this might be a forgery."

But Rice wouldn’t have had to look too far down into the “bowels of the Agency” since just about everyone in the intelligence community — and at least some people on her own National Security Council staff — had known the documents were phonies for almost a year.

Vice President Cheney had first asked the CIA to look into the matter. And in February 2002 the CIA sent an as-yet-unnamed former US Ambassador to Niger back to the country to investigate. His report back was unambiguous: the story was bogus.
A rose is a rose is a rose - The Hill - June 2003

Joseph C. Wilson, the retired United States ambassador whose CIA-directed mission to Niger in early 2002 helped debunk claims that Iraq had tried to obtain uranium there for nuclear weapons, has said for the first time publicly that U.S. and British officials ignored his findings and exaggerated the public case for invading Iraq.

Wilson, whose 23-year career included senior positions in Africa and Iraq, where he was acting ambassador in 1991, said the false allegations that Iraq was trying to buy uranium oxide from Niger about three years ago were used by President Bush and senior administration officials as a central piece of evidence to support their assertions that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.

"It really comes down to the administration misrepresenting the facts on an issue that was a fundamental justification for going to war," Wilson said yesterday. "It begs the question, what else are they lying about?"
Ex-Envoy: Nuclear Report Ignored - The Washington Post - July 2003