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Bernard Weiner's Blogs -- The Archives

May 31, 2004

OK, here are three questions having to do with the New York Times "apology," the naming of a post-June 30th interim Iraqi prime minister, and the Al Qaida attack on oil-company workers in Saudi Arabia over the weekend.

1) The New York Times has issued a "modified, limited" mea culpa for its coverage leading up to the Iraq War. Question: Is that the end of the matter, or will the paper finally fire Judith Miller -- the reporter whose articles passed on so much of the faulty exile/neo-con propaganda and thus exercised an enormous influence on getting the U.S. into war?

Miller wasn't even named in the paper's long "note" to its readers -- interestingly, published not on the front page (where Miller's war-stories usually were placed) but buried way back in the paper -- even though a goodly number of her stories were cited as egregious examples of poor journalism.

Here's how it worked. Chalabi and his neo-con supporters at the Pentagon or in Cheney's office would feed Miller some false, alarming information -- having to do with, say, biological weapons supposedly ready to be unleashed, or nuclear research supposedly being conducted -- and she would write a scary story, quoting unnamed "reliable sources." The New York Times would put the story on its front page.

Then Cheney, the point man for pushing the "we-need-to-get-Saddam-immediately" line, would go on national TV and repeat much the same information and notably add that it wasn't just him saying this, but the august New York Times had published similar facts. Other Administration officials would parrot the same line. More newspapers all around the country, and the world, would pick up Miller's story and similar "facts" by Bush spokesmen -- and why wouldn't they? The New York Times is the "paper of record," so, it was assumed, the information in the story must be solidly sourced and verified.

Tony Blair in London would pass on the New York Times and Cheney assertions to his Parliament and citizens. Well, you get the picture: Garbage in one end comes out the other end as confirmed, heightened "fact" -- when in actuality, it is nothing more than a bigger bag of very smelly garbage.

All very ha-ha until you realize that Congress permitted itself to be convinced by such "intelligence" and agit-prop "reporting" to give Bush&Co. a blank-check to initiate a full-scale war, and thousands of lives have been lost as a result -- and continue to be fed into the rathole that is the Iraq War. Disgraceful!

2. It's hard to figure out how Iyad Allawi came to be chosen as the new interim prime minister of the soon-to-be "sovereign" state of Iraq. The U.N. envoy Brahimi had settled on another leader, a scientist unconnected to Iraq's governing council, but couldn't get everyone to agree.

Question: Did the Iraqi Governing Council see a window of opportunity and picked Allawi while Brahimi was otherwise engaged on his hunt, and while the Bush Administration was riven with internal fights between the neo-cons at Defense and the realists at State? Or did the CIA, which managed to push the damaged-goods Chalabi out of the way, arrange for its own next-favored candidates to take over the new interim government? Not clear at all what the answer is.

Another question: Will the various factions in the Iraqi population -- especially in the Shia and Kurd communities -- support the self-selection of a leader who comes with suspect CIA and Chalabi connections (Allawi is Chalabi's cousin), one named to the IGC by the Americans in the first place?

Final question: What will be the reaction of the new Iraqi leadership, and the various Iraqi factions, when, on July 1, the "full sovereignty" promised by President Bush turns out to be a sham? The U.S. military will still exercise de facto control, and the contracts favoring U.S. corporations lock the Iraqi government into financial second-class status.

More questions than answers, but since the U.S. is operating in the murky world of Iraq political intrigue with little knowledge of the culture, and no real plan for the future, it's questions such as these that may be the most important.

3. Saudi terrorists associated with Al Qaida shot up some oil-company offices over the weekend, killing what they call "infidels" and "crusaders." Question: Why this relatively meaningless gesture when they could have destroyed a good share of the oil facility and pipelines and forced the U.S. and the Western world into an economic recession or worse?

The implication certainly is there that, for reasons we don't understand, Al Qaida decided to engage in a mere symbolic shoot-'em-up instead. Perhaps the answers have something to do with internal Saudi politics, or with a conviction that their extreme-Islamist forces (aided by a faction within the Saudi royal family) will soon take over the country, and, if and when that happens, they want control of an intact oil production system. A story worth keeping an eye on.

More below, from other bloggers, on some of these questions, and other matters.

Mark Kleiman encapsulates nicely some of the absurdities of the situation:

1. We're turning over full sovereignty to the Iraqi government to be installed June 30, except that the Iraqi army will still be taking orders from the American Army and the newly sovereign government won't be able to ask the American Army to leave. As the LA Times headline put it, "Full power -- with limits." Someone ought to have the President read Hobbes -- or maybe have someone read Hobbes out loud to the President -- so he will understand that "partially sovereign" makes about much sense as "partially pregnant."

2. The occupation will end June 30 but the number of troops in the [U.S.] army that gives orders to the Iraqi army will increase.

3. The Geneva Conventions fully apply to Iraq except for hostage-taking in violation of the Geneva Conventions).

That's just today's crop...

Steve Guilliard, in a blog called "Dead Man Walking," takes a dim view on the appointment of Allawi:

This is ridiculous. Here I was, ready to relax, watch Ashley Judd jump around in her panties on Fox, and I read about the totally screwed up selection process. Iyad Allawi, head of the Iraqi National Accord, a former Baathist and a CIA/MI6 rentboy, is now PM. You don't have to wear a tin foil hat to realize this guy is dead. They blew up Sergio DeMello, one of the Hakims, and Shia pilgrims. How Allawi expects to stay alive is beyond me.

Usually, like Noriega, they hide their CIA ties. This guy, besides coming from the hated Chalabi family, worked for the CIA and MI6. You don't have to be Sadr to think this stinks on ice. The Brahimi "agreement" seems like a US hustle to me. So they couldn't get Chalabi in the job, so they get his cousin. Not that Iraqis are that stupid, they know a hustle when they see one, so they will try their level best to blow him away, probably via semtex car bomb.

What's the big mistake? They picked someone from the hated IGC [Iraq Governing Council]. Iraqis hate these exiles who came back to scoop up the country while their kids fought the wars and suffered under the sanctions. These people cannot be given credibility by the US, UN or EU. By picking an exile, especially one greedy, desperate or stupid enough to take the job, is reinforcing failure. They could have picked a worse US puppet, but that's unlikely.

Laura Rozen a Washington-based national security reporter, wrote that Chalabi was caught by a "European intelligence agency" (read GCHQ, the British NSA) passing methods and sources of signal intelligence to Iraq.

Jonathan Pollard is still in jail for doing the same thing for Israel. John Walker is serving life for this. Handing over signals intelligence is one way to go to jail forever. It is the US gold standard, and they get very upset when it goes into other people's hands. Especially Iranian hands. The worst intelligence failures in the US were signal intelligence.

You cannot get more serious than an accusation of trading signals intelligence. And that means someone in DOD is a traitor. It's treason to even discuss sources and methods, so how did a foreign national without the SCI (above Top Secret, Secure Compartmentalized Intelligence) required to discuss such a subject be able to pass them on to Iran? Someone, and I mean a ranking civilian, passed them on and the list who can get that kind of thing is real small, a hundred people or so, outside NSA. The reason they cut [Chalabi] off so fast was the proven allegation he revealed the gold standard of US secrets.

There is no way that Chalabi could have gotten that info without someone high in DOD giving them to him. Doing so was treason. Not in the Bob Novak way, but real, go-to-jail-for-life treason. It would be a massive intelligence failure if this is true. Chalabi should have never had access to this information. Whoever gave it to him betrayed the United States.

Xymphora comments on the passing of top-secret information to Chalabi while he may or may not have been on the Iranian spy payroll:

Bob Dreyfuss summarizes new allegations that high officials in the Bush Administration (the names mentioned are Feith, Luti, Rhode and Rubin) passed highly classified electronic communications intercepts to Ahmad Chalabi in order to help him gain power in Iraq, and this intelligence ended up in the hands of the Iranians. If this is true - and I have to say that the whole Chalabi-Iran story is very fishy, and I particularly wonder how anyone can be sure where the Iranians obtained the intelligence (unless, of course, the CIA deliberately planted some sort of identifying tags in it to entrap the neocons!) -- it would dwarf the affair of the outing of Valerie Plame and might actually lead to somebody going to jail.

And here's the Robert Dreyfuss article mentioned above,

The fallout from the fall of Ahmad Chalabi looks like it might splash all over the Pentagon—the neocon hardliners in the Pentagon who've backed Chalabi since the '90s. And Chalabi's backers are worried. Here's today's Wall Street Journal editorial, citing a report in The New York Times that U.S. intelligence officials are investigating Pentagon officials:

Critics of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy are using the raid and the leaks as an excuse for demanding a purge of anyone who ever supported Mr. Chalabi. A Monday piece in The New York Times , based on more anonymous leaks, noted that 'intelligence officials' are investigating a handful of officials in Washington and Iraq who dealt regularly with Mr. Chalabi.' Are they Iranian agents, too?

Maybe, and maybe not. But next, here's a report from The Guardian :

An intelligence source in Washington said the CIA confirmed its long-held suspicions when it discovered that a piece of information from an electronic communications intercept by the National Security Agency had ended up in Iranian hands. The information was so sensitive that its circulation had been restricted to a handful of officials.

"This was 'sensitive compartmented information'—SCI—and it it was tracked right back to the Iranians through Aras Habib," the intelligence source said.

The DIA is also reported to have launched its own inquiry into the INC-Iran link.

An intelligence source in Washington said the FBI investigation into the affair would begin with Mr. Chalabi's "handlers" in the Pentagon, who include William Luti, the former head of the office of special plans, and his immediate superior, Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defence for policy. There is no evidence that they were the source of the leaks. Other INC supporters at the Pentagon may have given away classified information in an attempt to give Mr. Chalabi an advantage in the struggle for power surrounding the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30.

Next is this, from UPI yesterday, reporting that the FBI is investigating a Pentagon official and a former Pentagon official for having passed classified info to Chalabi. Though not named, the two officials in the UPI story are, according to my sources, Harold Rhode, an official in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, and Michael Rubin, now at the American Enterprise Institute. Reports UPI:

Officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority are suspected of having leaked sensitive CIA and Pentagon intercepts to the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress, which passed them on to the government of Iran, according to federal law enforcement officials and serving and former U.S. intelligence officials.

These sources also acknowledged that the Bush administration has been the victim of an enormous Iran-perpetrated intelligence fraud that worked to provoke a U.S. military invasion of Iraq in order to defeat Iran's bitter, long-time enemy, a campaign of deception which one U.S. source called "positively a most brilliant and extraordinarily successful operation."

This source said that some of the intercepts are believed to have been given to Chalabi by two U.S. officials of the Coalition Provision Authority, both of whom are not named here because UPI could not reach them for comment.

Other targets of the probe include senior and other Pentagon officials who dealt with Chalabi on a regular basis, this source said.

One former CPA official has returned to the United States and is employed at the American Enterprise Institute, the former very senior official said, a fact which FBI sources confirmed without additional comment.

When I asked Rubin if the story was accurate, he replied with the three-word message: "It is untrue."

It's not clear where all this might lead. Certainly, the CIA is a sworn enemy of Chalabi, and it has been for many years. And certainly, Chalabi's enemies would love to use the scandal over Chalabi's Iran connections to tarnish his Pentacon allies. But it seems to me unlikely that they would risk a formal investigation unless they had some concrete evidence to support what otherwise would be a witch hunt.

Digby shows how much campaign politics is determining what is coming out of the Bush Administration these days. (And, by the way, did anyone notice that an FBI "urgent" terrorist warning over the weekend to several major cities was quietly rescinded due to "faulty intelligence"? Oh, more: by law only the head of the Homeland Security Department can issue a public warning; Ashcroft did his original hyped public warning last week on his own, no doubt after receiving his Rove-ian marching orders. Nobody even told poor Tom Ridge the warning was coming. This gang of thieves is imploding more day by day.)

So, here's Digby on the chaos within the Bush Administration: Â It really has fallen completely apart. The government, I mean. The CIA and the Pentagon are at each others throats, as we already knew. The State Department and the Pentagon, too. The office of Homeland Security is pissed at the Justice Department. Everybody hates everybody.

Now, according to Laura Rozen, the White House is tacitly approving all this infighting as long as nobody directly criticizes Junior Codpiece:

Secondly, about Condoleezza Rice's meeting with the pro-Chalabi crowd last week. I am told Rice requested the meeting with Perle, Woolsey, Gingrich, Pletka, Rubin et al, to ask them not to go off the reservation, in reaction to the White House cut off of Chalabi. And if you have noticed, they have refrained for the most part from directing their public criticism directly at the White House, attacking the CIA, DIA and State instead for a policy decision that came from the very top.

That's how bad its gotten. Go ahead and rake our administration over the coals if you want to. Just don't say anything bad about Junior. (Voters don't know that the president is responsible for the whole executive branch so they won't hold it against him.)...

Now, on to the New York Times "apology." Digby has a go at making sense of the Times' action:

Daniel Okrent [the New York Times' ombudsman] says the paper failed in its WMD coverage prior to the war. Everybody is at fault and it's wrong to single anybody out in particular and the way to put this behind them is to finally report the truth. Great.

Here's the problem. Like the Bush administration, they seem to think that "taking responsibility" means acting as if it was some vague and ephemeral "somebody" who committed the act and then going on as if nothing happened. These are children's ethics.

The only way journalists will understand that repeatedly publishing and hyping incorrect information (particularly disinformation) is unacceptable is if they will pay a price for doing so. That's what grown-ups expect when they screw up. And the only way the public can be assured that The New York Times cares about its credibility is if it holds the people who made these massive errors responsible.

The New York Times recently fired Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg because they plagiarized and misrepresented the truth. Presumably, the paper did this because its credibility was at stake. They simply could not countenance publishing work that was not truthful because then people would stop believing what they printed and wouldn't buy the paper. Yet, they have repeatedly allowed themselves to be used by GOP Washington players to further their agenda over the last twelve years and as a result have printed wrong or misleading information hundreds of times. Sometimes, as with the Wen Ho Lee story, they investigated the problems, issued a mea culpa and then moved on. Other times, as with the endless Whitewater and independent counsel stories, they simply never addressed it. The hyped WMD stories are only the latest in a series of politically motivated disinformation campaigns.

And, the problem remains. After twelve years of blown story after blown story, it is time for the press (and not just The NY Times) to either declare that they are extensions of the Republican Party or expose their sources when they've shown themselves to be purposefully passing incorrect information (which Okrent endorses as proper journalistic ethics.)

Judith Miller undoubtedly believes she is being unfairly scapegoated, but she is not. Blair and Bragg were fired for offenses that didn't lead to any real consequences other than a lot of journalistic navel gazing. Yet Miller, more than anyone, was a willing tool for certain political friends and sources and used her prestige and position on the paper of record to further their agenda to take this country into a war. That is inexcusable. However, The New York Times has decided to excuse her and others like Patrick Tyler and Jill Abrahamson and is allowing them to keep their jobs.

Fine. If the paper wishes to hang its credibility on journalists like this then it obviously no longer cares about it. Therefore, the New York Times is collectively guilty and should be held responsible for the actions of these failed journalists.

The paper of record has officially chosen to became just another daily rag.

RIP, Gray Lady.

And Atrios logs in:

...to be fair, Left I does highlight one place where Okrent gets it exactly right.

That automatic editor defense, 'We're not confirming what he says, we're just reporting it,' may apply to the statements of people speaking on the record. For anonymous sources, it's worse than no defense. It's a license granted to liars. The contract between a reporter and an unnamed source - the offer of info rmation in return for anonymity - is properly a binding one. But I believe that a source who turns out to have lied has breached that contract, and can fairly be exposed. The victims of the lie are the paper's readers, and the contract with them supersedes all others.

When an anonymous source with an agenda burns you, then immediately the story should be inverted. It is no longer about whatever the source is feeding you, it is now that the source lied to you. It isn't just about having an obligation to readers, it's recognizing that there is now a real story to tell, such as "Bush Administration Officials Trying to Manipulate Public By Lying to Media."

Until editors and reporters are willing to internalize the basic idea that anonymous sources must be outed when they're caught lying, they should not be used.

Here's how David Neiwert sees the attack campaign against John Kerry:

We knew all along that the Bush campaign would stop at nothing, stooping to even the most outrageous smear, to defeat John Kerry this November. Now it's happening. It's becoming clearer every day that one of the chief Republican talking points emerging in the campaign is the suggestion that a vote for Kerry is a vote for Al Qaeda -- because, purportedly, the terrorists secretly want Bush defeated, since Kerry is "soft" on the "war on terror." Of course, a cornerstone of this ploy is the belief that the so-called liberal media will gladly transmit this smear.

Atrios recently caught one of the more egregious examples of this meme being broadcast on CNN's Wolf Blitzer program.

...What's really Newspeakish in an utterly Bizzarro kind of fashion about this particular instance of the smear is that it turns on its head what at least one purported Al Qaeda faction has actually said, to wit:

The statement said it supported President Bush in his reelection campaign, and would prefer him to win in November rather than the Democratic candidate John Kerry, as it was not possible to find a leader "more foolish than you (Bush), who deals with matters by force rather than with wisdom." In comments addressed to Bush, the group said:

"Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilization."

"Because of this we desire you (Bush) to be elected."

And remember all the controversy about the mass-killing by U.S. forces at a supposed "wedding party" in Iraq? The U.S. military commanders continue to spout the line that the house near the Syrian border was a legitimate target, supposedly housing terrorists; there is video footage that seems to back up the locals' claim that it was a genuine wedding celebration that was bombed and attacked. Juan Cole posts this:

The controversy on the US bombing of what appears to have been a wedding party near Syria continues to boil, with this al Jazeerah editorial taking the con side to the story, while Gen. Kimmit sticks to his guns. I thought readers might be interested in an assessment by an academic with long experience in the region. McGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago writes:

As someone who has worked for more than 35 years in Iraq, and for several years in Syria, right up against the Iraqi border, I can add some information on the situation there. All along both sides of the border are small settlements of people, who make their living by herding. Any village or encampment on either side will have in it a mixture of people who were born on the other. Many women from villages in Iraq marry relatives who live in Syria, and vice versa. In fact, in the village of Hamoukar where I was digging from 1999 until 2001, probably half of the families have close relatives in Iraq or were born there. The border is relatively undefended and unfenced, and in the past people could cross, but they took risks in doing so.

There was a certain amount of smuggling, usually consumer goods, and I would be very greatly surprised if there has not been a greatly enhanced degree of trading across the border, given the demand for products that exists in Iraq now. A few years ago, Iraq and Syria both thawed relations and allowed visits, and a lot of villagers in Syria went to Iraq to see relatives whom they had not seen in years, and some Iraqis were allowed to visit Syrian relatives. Iraqi taxi cabs, easily identifiable by their orange and white colors, were numerous on the roads of Syria in the past five years.

In the current situation, with the Iraqi secret police no longer getting reports from agents among the populace, the visits by Syrians would have been greatly increased. As far as I have been able to find out, there were some attempts to control the border points at Tell Kochek, Abu Kemal and on the superhighways to Syria and Jordan, but I would be surprised if the long desert border has been much controlled. That there were men from Syria in the Iraqi village that was attacked would not be at all surprising, given the fact that there was a wedding and that there was and is commerce across the border. The arrival of the guests might have looked very suspicious on satellite images That there should be foreign money is also not surprising. There is a lot of foreign money in Iraq and there has been for years.

Everything you have been saying about the Shia also rings true. I have worked most of my career in the south of Iraq, at Nippur (near Afak, Diwaniyah area). What I know to be the case is that most people would have preferred a secular government, that the Shia do not want to split the country up, and that the US and British blunders in the south have been based on no information, outdated WW I concepts, or distorted information from self-serving people who have been outside the country for many years. The Occupation authority has made it almost impossible to have a political base other than religion or ethnic community, and we are thus creating splits and tension between Iraqis that have not been very noticeable in the past.

McGuire Gibson
Professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology
Oriental Institute, University of Chicago

May 28, 2004

THE IRAQI MONKEY ON BUSH'S BACK

Bush's absolutely awful speech last week -- the one where he promised to lay out his "plan" for how to proceed in Iraq-- is good news electorally for Kerry and the Democrats. But, sad to say, it presages more death and destruction for Iraq and Iraqis -- and for our young men and women who are being sent into the killing zone -- and more damage to America's national interests.

We know that Bush&Co. venture into fantasyland pretty often, refusing to see the real world for what it is, but still it's difficult to believe they thought they could get away with such a disgracefully empty collection of trite phrases and stay-the-course pronouncements in Bush's Iraq address. One has to think they hauled out the old platitudes yet again as an experiment, to see how much they might really need to change.

They got their answer almost immediately. The darts came flying in from all directions -- Republicans, military men, Pelosi, Kennedy, Zinni, Bill Clinton, and now from two true heavyweights, Al Gore and John Kerry. Unless the Rove boys are total bunglers -- I heard that chuckle! -- the next Bush speech on Iraq will be quite different, including some important initiatives.

Bush&Co. are so desperate to get the Iraq monkey off their back, they might even go for early direct elections -- even if it means an Islamic theocracy. Anything to stop the political bleeding. Including, if the U.N. can come up with candidates willing to serve in an interim government, the remote possibility that Bush will declare "victory" now that "democracy is established and on its way in Iraq," and remove the U.S. troops.

Not likely, I agree, but the situation is so dire for the U.S. -- and thus for Bush's hopes to win a second term -- that nothing is off the table. All that counts right now is politics; everything else, and everyone else, can be tossed overboard, if need be. (If Bush pulls out a victory in November, then it's back to the drawing boards for how to control the greater Middle East.)

GORE LETS IT RIP

Gore's blockbuster speech, really laying the wood to Bush and Cheney -- and calling for the resignations of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Tenet, et al. -- was the Gore we would liked to have seen on the campaign trail in 2000. You've got to read it. It says it all. (See sample excerpts below.)

Kerry's foreign policy address the next day paled a bit in comparison, but at least it had some oomph and contained some major attacks on Bush incompetence in Iraq and elsewhere.

Kerry must come to realize that he can't risk merely a narrow victory in November. A terrorist attack that revives 9/11 fright and rally-'round-the-President feelings could wipe out all the public-opinion gains the Democrats are accruing right now. (Which is why Ashcroft whipped out the rushed, hyped Al-Qaida-is-coming warning the other day -- even though there was no new intelligence to justify it.) In addition, close races in the major states in play could be offset by someone fiddling with the computer tallies just enough to throw the race to BushCheney.

SUNSHINE & STAKES

No, garlic and crosses won't do the trick here. It's sunlight and a stake-through-the-heart that are required -- the sunshine of revealing more and more of the lies and incompetencies behind much of Bush&Co. policy, the stake-through-the-heart of a landslide victory that can't be undone by terrorism or altered by vote-tampering.

That's why it's good to see Kerry coming out of his oh-so-polite shell and raising the political stakes to match the misleading ads and scurrilous dirty tricks employed by Karl Rove. If Kerry really wants to win, and guarantee his victory, he's got to generate a passion for change in the electorate big enough for a HUGE landslide in November. And, if he and we play our cards right, and if Bush&Co. continue to implode in scandal after scandal, we even could break the back of the GOP's stranglehold in Congress, and maybe (I can dream) get impeachment proceedings started.

Stranger things have happened, and Bush&Co. seem absolutely possessed by the self-destructive virus that comes with ignorance, stubbornness, arrogance, and the belief they are doing the work of God, on orders.

Unless they take their anti-viral medication and get back on track soon, they will have only their fundamentalist base to rely on (maybe 30-35% of the vote), with moderates and traditional conservatives, members of the military, veterans, independents, etc. joining the Democrats to get these guys and their reckless, dangerous policies out of the White House. If they even can last thro ugh November.

Oh, happy day!

Iraq is such a disaster that even the neo-cons that got us into the mess are sounding gloomy as they read the electoral handwriting on the wall. Atrios found this quote:

"The truth is it wouldn't take much actually to turn this around, not that they necessarily will," said Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for The New American Century, a leading neoconservative think tank. "There are a lot of very positive trends going on in Iraq, and I think if you take care of the security situation and the political trend lines toward real elections, in fact I think Iraq is more than salvageable." As Atrios notes, those are mighty BIG "ifs".

Hesiod says that Richard Perle is "officially off the reservation":

Richard Perle, until recently a powerful adviser to U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, described U.S. policy in post-war Iraq as a failure.

"I would be the first to acknowledge we allowed the liberation (of Iraq) to subside into an occupation. And I think that was a grave error, and in some ways a continuing error," said Perle, former chair of the influential Defence Policy Board, which advises the Pentagon.

The neo-cons had such a smooth ride for such a long time that they're somewhat shellshocked as they realize they have to face the music that is public scrutiny.

Read this from Kos:

"Ahh, this is the kind of story [by former Clinton senior aide Sidney Blumenthal] that warms the heart.

At a well-appointed conservative think tank in downtown Washington and across the Potomac River at the Pentagon, FBI agents have begun paying quiet calls on prominent neoconservatives, who are being interviewed in an investigation of potential espionage, according to intelligence sources. Who gave Ahmed Chalabi classified information about the plans of the U.S. government and military?

The Iraqi neocon favorite, tipped to lead his liberated country post-invasion, has been identified by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency as an Iranian double agent, passing secrets to that citadel of the "axis of evil" for decades. All the while the neocons cosseted, promoted and arranged for more than $30 million in Pentagon payments to the George Washington manquÃ© of Iraq. In return, he fed them a steady diet of disinformation, and in the run-up to the war he sent various exiles to nine nations' intelligence agencies to spread falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction.

If the administration had wanted other material to provide a rationale for invasion, no doubt that would have been fabricated. Either Chalabi perpetrated the greatest con since the Trojan horse or he was the agent of influence for the most successful intelligence operation conducted by Iran, or both.

So will the neocons get their comeuppance? Probably not. But there is a sort of delicious irony in seeing these assholes, who for so long screamed "treason!" at anyone who opposed their foolish plans, suddenly become the subject of an espionage investigation.

So next time any Bush apologist questions your patriotism, ask right back -- "Who sold out our nation to an 'Axis of Evil' spy? Heck, who invited this spy to the State of the Union Address?" It wasn't the anti-war crowd.

And while reading that piece by Sydney Blumenthal, don't miss the final paragraph, the Mother of all Rants:

Washington, which was just weeks ago in the grip of neoconservative orthodoxy and absolute belief in Bush's inevitability and righteousness, is now in the throes of agonizing events and being ripped apart by investigations. Things fall apart; all that was hidden is revealed; all sacred exposed as profane: the military, loyal and lumbering, betrayed and embittered; the general in the field, Lt. Gen. Sanchez, disgraced and cashiered; and the most respected retired generals training their artillery on those who have ill-used the troops, still dying in the field; the intelligence agencies, a nautilus of chambers, abused and angry, its retired operatives plying their craft with the press corps, seeping dangerous truths; the press, hesitatingly and wobbly, investigating its own falsehoods; the neocons, publicly redoubling their passionate intensity, defending their hero and deceiver Chalabi, privately squabbling, anxiously awaiting the footsteps of FBI agents; Colin Powell, once the most acclaimed man in America, embarked on an endless quest to restore his reputation, damaged above all by his failure of nerve; everyone in the line of fire motioning toward the chain of command, spiraling upward and sideways, until the finger pointing in a phalanx is directed at the hollow crown.

Amen, brother.

Robert Dreyfuss at TomPaine.com carries the Chalabi story a bit further:

The fallout from the fall of Ahmad Chalabi looks like it might splash all over the Pentacons — the neocon hardliners in the Pentagon who've backed Chalabi since the '90s. And Chalabi's backers are worried. Here's today's Wall Street Journal editorial, citing a report in The New York Times that U.S. intelligence officials are investigating Pentagon officials:

Critics of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy are using the raid and the leaks as an excuse for demanding a purge of anyone who ever supported Mr. Chalabi. A Monday piece in The New York Times, based on more anonymous leaks, noted that 'intelligence officials' are investigating a handful of officials in Washington and Iraq who dealt regularly with Mr. Chalabi.' Are they Iranian agents, too?

Maybe, and maybe not. But next, here's a report from The Guardian:

An intelligence source in Washington said the CIA confirmed its long-held suspicions when it discovered that a piece of information from an electronic communications intercept by the National Security Agency had ended up in Iranian hands. The information was so sensitive that its circulation had been restricted to a handful of officials.

"This was 'sensitive compartmented information'—SCI—and it it was tracked right back to the Iranians through [high-level Chalabi aide] Aras Habib," the intelligence source said.

The DIA is also reported to have launched its own inquiry into the INC-Iran link.

An intelligence source in Washington said the FBI investigation into the affair would begin with Mr. Chalabi's "handlers" in the Pentagon, who include William Luti, the former head of the Office of Special Plans, and his immediate superior, Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defence for Policy. There is no evidence that they were the source of the leaks. Other INC supporters at the Pentagon may have given away classified information in an attempt to give Mr. Chalabi an advantage in the struggle for power surrounding the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30.

Next is this, from UPI yesterday, reporting that the FBI is investigating a Pentagon official and a former Pentagon official for having passed classified info to Chalabi. Though not named, the two officials in the UPI story are, according to my sources, Harold Rhode, an official in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, and Michael Rubin, now at the American Enterprise Institute. Reports UPI:

...It's not clear where all this might lead. Certainly, the CIA is a sworn enemy of Chalabi, and it has been for many years. And certainly, Chalabi's enemies would love to use the scandal over Chalabi's Iran connections to tarnish his Pentagon allies. But it seems to me unlikely that they would risk a formal investigation unless they had some concrete evidence to support what otherwise would be a witch hunt.

Digby lauds Gore and Kerry for the tone and content of their major speeches:

I urge all of you to read President Gore's speech if you didn't get to see him give it.

Al Gore has a unique position in the eyes of the world, especially in places where Machiavellian vote-counting schemes are the norm rather than the exception. He is the shadow president, the man who should be at the helm instead of the man whom they have almost universally come to despise.

His words have particular meaning because they express to many the beliefs of the majority of Americans. He alone has the authority to speak for all of us who were cheated and have been forced to sit by as this usurper, through incompetence, misplaced machismo and --- most of all --- unbelievable hubris, has managed to destroy more than half a century's worth of international goodwill and over two centuries hard won belief by the American people in the rule of law.

The world is watching to see what we do in November. They are counting on us to save this country and them. Al Gore is the single best person to reassure the world that we are serious, we understand the problem and we are going to deal with it.

A few excerpts follow, but I urge you, again, to read the whole speech:

AL GORE'S SPEECH (EXCERPTS)

What happened at the prison, it is now clear, was not the result of random acts by "a few bad apples," it was the natural consequence of the Bush Administration policy that has dismantled those wise constraints and has made war on America's checks and balances.

The abuse of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib flowed directly from the abuse of
the truth that characterized the Administration's march to war and the abuse of the trust that had been placed in President Bush by the American people in the aftermath of September 11th.

There was then, there is now and there would have been regardless of what Bush did, a threat of terrorism that we would have to deal with. But instead of making it better, he has made it infinitely worse. We are less safe because of his policies. He has created more anger and righteous indignation against us as Americans than any leader of our country in the 228 years of our existence as a nation -- because of his attitude of contempt for any person, institution or nation who disagrees with him.

...President Bush said in his speech Monday night that the war in Iraq is "the central front in the war on terror." It's not the central front in the war on terror, but it has unfortunately become the central recruiting office for terrorists. [Dick Cheney said, "This war may last the rest of our lives.] The unpleasant truth is that President Bush's utter incompetence has made the world a far more dangerous place and dramatically increased the threat of terrorism against the United States. Just yesterday, the International Institute of Strategic Studies reported that the Iraq conflict " has arguable focused the energies and resources of Al Qaeda and its followers while diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition." The ISS said that in the wake of the war in Iraq Al Qaeda now has more than 18,000 potential terrorists scattered around the world and the war in Iraq is swelling its ranks.

...Make no mistake, the damage done at Abu Ghraib is not only to America's reputation and America's strategic interests, but also to America's spirit. It is also crucial for our nation to recognize - and to recognize quickly - that the damage our nation has suffered in the world is far, far more serious than President Bush's belated and tepid response would lead people to believe. Remember how shocked each of us, individually, was when we first saw those hideous images. The natural tendency was to first recoil from the images, and then to assume that they represented a strange and rare aberration that resulted from a few twisted minds or, as the Pentagon assured us, "a few bad apples."

But as today's shocking news reaffirms yet again, this was not rare. It was not an aberration. Today's New York Times reports that an Army survey of prisoner deaths and mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanistan "show a widespread pattern of abuse involving more military units than previously known.'

Nor did these abuses spring from a few twisted minds at the lowest ranks of our military enlisted personnel. No, it came from twisted values and atrocious policies at the highest levels of our government. This was done in our name, by our leaders. These horrors were the predictable consequence of policy choices that flowed directly from this administration's contempt for the rule of law. And the dominance they have been seeking is truly not simply unworthy of America - it is also an illusory goal in its own right.

...A policy based on domination of the rest of the world not only creates enemies for the United States and creates recruits for Al Qaeda, it also undermines the international cooperation that is essential to defeating the efforts of terrorists who wish harm and intimidate Americans.

Unilateralism, as we have painfully seen in Iraq, is its own reward. Going it alone may satisfy a political instinct but it is dangerous to our military, even without their Commander in Chief taunting terrorists to "bring it on."

...They resent any constraint as an insult to their will to dominate and exercise power. Their appetite for power is astonishing. It has led them to introduce a new level of viciousness in partisan politics. It is that viciousness that led them to attack as unpatriotic, Senator Max Cleland, who lost three limbs in combat during the Vietnam War.

...The abhorrent acts in the prison were a direct consequence of the culture of impunity encouraged, authorized and instituted by Bush and Rumsfeld in their statements that the Geneva Conventions did not apply. The apparent war crimes that took place were the logical, inevitable outcome of policies and statements from the administration.

...President Bush offered a brief and half-hearted apology to the Arab world - but he should apologize to the American people for abandoning the Geneva Conventions. He also owes an apology to the U.S. Army for cavalierly sending them into harm's way while ignoring the best advice of their commanders. Perhaps most importantly of all, he should apologize to all those men and women throughout our world who have held the ideal of the United States of America as a shining goal, to inspire their hopeful efforts to bring about justice under a rule of law in their own lands. Of course, the problem with all these legitimate requests is that a sincere apology requires an admission of error, a willingness to accept responsibility and to hold people accountable. And President Bush is not only unwilling to acknowledge error. He has thus far been unwilling to hold anyone in his administration accountable for the worst strategic and military miscalculations and mistakes in the history of the United States of America.

...In December of 2000, even though I strongly disagreed with the decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to order a halt to the counting of legally cast ballots, I saw it as my duty to reaffirm my own strong belief that we are a nation of laws and not only accept the decision, but do what I could to prevent efforts to delegitimize George Bush as he took the oath of office as president.

I did not at that moment imagine that Bush would, in the presidency that ensued, demonstrate utter contempt for the rule of law and work at every turn to frustrate accountability...

So today, I want to speak on behalf of those Americans who feel that President Bush has betrayed our nation's trust, those who are horrified at what has been done in our name, and all those who want the rest of the world to know that we Americans see the abuses that occurred in the prisons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo and secret locations as yet undisclosed as completely out of keeping with the character and basic nature of the American people and at odds with the principles on which America stands.

I believe we have a duty to hold President Bush accountable - and I believe we will. As Lincoln said at our time of greatest trial, "We - even we here - hold the power, and bear the responsibility."

I hope that this speech is covered heavily in the rest of the world. The situation is so dire that it is important that people realize that the duly elected president of the United States stands in stark contrast to the usurper who sits in the White House. These words could go a long way to calm some of the anger overseas by clearly and distinctly separating the hated president from the American people.

KERRY COMES OUT SWINGING

For what it's worth [Digby continues] Kerry is on the same page this week as Gore. I don't think this is an accident.

At the same moment Attorney General John Ashcroft was telling reporters in Washington that al-Qaida may be planning an attack on the United States, Sen. John Kerry was in Seattle, arguing that Ashcroft and his Bush administration colleagues have failed to do enough to prepare for such an attack.

Noting that Bush administration officials have repeatedly said that a terrorist attack in the United States is a question of "when, not if," Kerry asked why the administration hasn't moved more decisively to increase the number of cops on the street, to require inspections of cargo container ships, to increase security on trains and to protect nuclear power plants and other potentially vulnerable targets.

"I'm not going to stand in front of you as a potential president and say to you that you can protect every single place and harden every single target in the country -- all Americans know that," Kerry told a few thousand supporters who braved Seattle's drizzle to see the candidate speak on a public pier. "But what we can do is protect against catastrophe. What we can do is protect those places that are most logical places for the largest potential damage or danger. And that is the responsibility of a president." While Kerry didn't specifically say -- as some of his supporters have -- that Ashcroft's warnings could be a politically motivated ploy to shore up Bush's free-falling approval ratings, he came awfully close to doing so. "We deserve a president of the United States who doesn't make homeland security a photo opportunity and the rhetoric of a campaign," Kerry said. "We deserve a president who makes America safer."

Kerry begins an 11-day "focus" on national security and foreign policy in Seattle Thursday with what aides are billing as a major speech on terrorism and the war on Iraq. Wednesday's speech -- in which Kerry said that Bush had repeatedly misled the country about Iraq -- may have been a preview of things to come.

Invoking his own experience in Vietnam, Kerry said that the ultimate test of a commander-in-chief in wartime comes when he must look the parents of a fallen soldier in the eye. At that moment, Kerry said the president must be able to say of any war: "I tried to do everything in my power to avoid it, but the threat was such that we had no choice." Bush, Kerry said, "failed -- and fails -- that test in Iraq."

Steve Guilliard is spot-on in examining "Why Iraq Is Not Working":

This will be short and painless. Print it out and hand it to your few remaining friends who support the war.

1) There is no internal political support for either the IGC [Iraq Governing Council] or the UN version of an occupational government.

The UN rep picking the new head of Vichy Iraq was enraged when someone from the GOPCPA leaked his name. The guy, realizing that the resistance would kill him like a dog via car bomb, promptly refused the job. The fact is that the only representative Iraqi leadership are religious leaders. Brahimi wanted to pick a technocrat, but no matter how you say it, it's still spelled P-e-t-a-i-n, and we all know how he wound up. Not that it matters. Without a heads up from Sistani and the Sunni clerics, the guy is going to be killed by the resistance, Al Qaeda or the US (by accident, of course).

The Kurds, with 20 percent of the population, are now demanding the Presidency or Vice Presidency, which is sure to send Sadr and his Sunni allies into a rage. The Kurds took part in the fighting at Fallujah, and many, many Iraqis are none too happy with their countrymen.

2) Splitting Iraq is vastly unpopular with most Iraqis.

While Peter Galbraith has been running around on the behest of his Kurdish allies, calling for "a loose confederation", which would let the Kurds destroy the territorial integrity of Iraq, while doing their own thing (smuggling, disrupting neighboring nations), Phebe Marr, one of the few actual Iraq historians in the US, gave him the smackdown on Nightline last week. The simple fact is that the Kurds will face a massive Turkish invasion if they get what they want. They also forget how ALL Iraqis opposed the Turks joining the occupation force.

This new "splitting Iraq" meme is really based in an ignorance of Iraq's economy. Without access to the income from the southern oil fields, the rest of Iraq will go bankrupt. You can't leave the Sunnis without income and splitting Iraq would turn it into a Middle Bank, with poor people with guns fighting their neighbors.

Besides the fact that it would be a violation of international law, it's just a very stupid idea based on our perceptions of Iraq and not reality.

3) Our allies are not coming to help us

As the German Ambassador to the US said so plainly on CNN, how would NATO help the occupation? The Iraqis will kill Germans just like they kill Poles, British and until recently, the Spanish. There is no clamor for NATO to occupy Iraq. Iraqs aren't saying "Germany save us." Besides, there aren't the votes to deploy troops in these Parliaments. International occupation is just adding targets for the resistance.

4)The Iraqis have made a choice: to undermine the Occupation.

The fact is that anyone working for the occupation faces intimidation or death. This isn't the consensus of a few people, but widely supported by average Iraqis. Someone has to be talking to the resistance. That resistance is widespread, with people in every corner of the GOPCPA. One of the fundamental mistakes of the US was to assume, despite all available evidence, Iraqis supported the occupation. Sistani could have sent thousands into the police and military with one word. So when Bush says "the Iraqis have to stand for freedom," he ignores the reality that most Iraqis are content to watch Americans die without lifting a finger to help.

5) Reconstruction is a corrupt, poorly managed nightmare.

The GOPCPA cannot maintain anything in Iraq. Instead of hiring reconstruction experts from NGO's, they hired from the Heritage Foundation's reject list. People who were ideologically sound were hired over the competant and trained. People like Michael Ledeen's daughter, Simone, were given the task of rebuilding Iraq's economy. Imagine the reaction of highly educated, Harvard, Oxford and Sorbonne-trained Iraqi economists, when they could get into the Green Zone, dealing with these idiot children. By sending the pure, loyal and untrained, they told the Iraqis they were not serious people. The neocons were allowed to turn Iraq into their playground, and test their wacky theories. Meanwhile Iraqi oil facilities have been attacked 54 times since the occupation started.

Rumors of overcharging and kickback litter the news on a near-daily basis. Halliburton has been accused of running empty [truck] trailers to get paid from the US government. Even so, the lack of security which is endemic in Iraq makes reconstruction a nightmare.

6) No security means nothing can get done.

Even reporters have to travel with "security consultants" to do their stories. Baghdad is effectively cut off from the rest of the country. The road net is insecure and remains that way, at best. The fact is that the US doesn't have the troops to secure the roads, and will not get any. This is the kind of job our Pakistani auxillaries would have done, but since their intervention would immediately launch a civil war in Pakistan, it's not going to happen. We're about to send two training units to Iraq, we're so short of troops. The 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the OPFOR unit at Ft. Irwin, is being sent to Iraq. Now, you don't have to be a nuclear physicist or a military strategist to see how dangerous this is. The 11th ACR is the unit other units need to train in combat proficiency. Sending them to Iraq is a sign of pure desperation. Other units cannot train effectively if the 11th ACR is in Iraq, hunting guerrillas.

The US's reliance on Iraqi security forces is really a reliance on a force which will ultimately fail. They have no commitment to the government and no support within the wider community. We can Iraqimize the force, but if Sistani issues a fatwa, who do you think they will support? The US and Iraqi Vichy governments? Or their clerics?

In short, Bush's strategy is failing, and none of this relies on the abject hatred caused by our actions at Abu Ghraib. That just makes any US plan in Iraq unsustainable. The IGC hasn't been asking questions about kicking US forces out of Iraq for their health. No Iraqi government could ever be considered legitimate if it allowed the US to establish bases there. That's a political non-starter as much as shipping oil to Haifa. The Army thinks they'll be there five years, but in reality, five months is a stretch. We don't have the men and NATO is going to decline to lend us a hand, no matter what they say in Congress. The US has to leave Iraq at some point and that point will be sooner rather than later. We are at the early stages of the Abu Ghraib scandal and in the end, it will so discredit US policy that we'll have to flee the country.

May 24, 2004

CHALABI SCANDAL AND BERG MURDER

This blog is about ignorance. Mainly mine.

I don't know what to make of two of the hottest items in the news: Nick Berg's murder and the Ahmed Chalabi affair. I've seen and read a lot of speculation and alleged facts about both of these major stories, but I confess to being much less certain about the truth, which may or may not reveal itself more fully in the coming weeks.

Nick Berg's Murder

Rabid insurgents have beheaded and otherwise sliced up bodies of Americans killed during convoy ambushes and roadside bombs, so the beheading of a captured American by Iraqis out for Abu Ghraib revenge could make sense. (A good share of Muslim governments and organizations denounced Berg's execution as being both against the teachings of the Koran, and counter-productive to the anti-Occupation cause.)

But there are troubling questions that have been raised as to whether the true killers of Berg were really those connected to Al Qaida, as the U.S. was quick to claim, or were thugs under control of the American military -- either covert ops at Abu Ghraib, with their faces hidden and dressed up as Arabs, or U.S.-friendly Iraqi policemen acting the parts.

The Bush Administration has been guilty of so much lying and deception that it's easy to at least entertain the possibility that they're lying again on the Berg case, and, if you're into conspiracy theories, ordered the whole thing in order to try to deactivate the torture-scandal by showing the bestiality of the enemy. Many Muslims believed that from the get-go, but even some Americans are thinking such thoughts also. For two examples, here, and here.

Me? I don't know what to believe, but I'm searching for the clues as they unravel.

One possible smoking-gun possibility may rest with the camera that took the video of the Berg execution. Here's one theory of how it might play out: "Today video was released showing prisoners being tortured by Americans. Apparently Kodak film experts at Kodak Park in Rochester New York have compared the digital watermarks of the torture video and the beheading video and have determined that one of the cameras used in the Nick Berg beheading is the same camera that took the prison torture video."

I've seen no independent verification of that alleged Kodak test, but it's worth keeping an eye out for more details, especially if it can be established that the Berg video was shot at Abu Ghraib. Some Iraqi suspects have been arrested in Iraq in connection with the beheading, and maybe we'll learn more from and about them, but probably always through a U.S. military lens. Stay tuned.

Ahmed Chalabi's Fall

One could go batty trying to parse out the convolutions in this complex tale of intrigue and double-crossing. Is Chalabi a U.S. puppet? Is Chalabi a front man for Israeli interests? Is Chalabi an Iranian spy? Is Chalabi a patsy for unseen forces yet to be uncovered? Is this about Chalabi at all, or is what's unfolding mostly a public escalation of the ongoing bitter private dispute between State and Defense, the "realists" vs. the "neo-cons"? Any of these theories true? All of them true?

I haven't the foggiest. Clearly, what we are seeing on the surface of this story is but the tip of an enormous iceberg of internecine warfare in the U.S. government, and Middle East double-dealing, intrigue, corruption, backstabbing, and double- and triple-crossing. The coming weeks and months will tell us more.

There is one Chalabi theory that I find intriguing. Follow this tortuous reasoning: The U.S. neo-cons (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz, et. al) wanted, and still would want, to install Chalabi as Saddam's successor. But Chalabi never really caught on with the Iraqi public, who viewed him as a likely U.S. puppet. So there was no chance Chalabi could take over and do the U.S. bidding. But if Chalabi can be made to look like an Iraqi nationalist angry at American interference in Iraqi internal affairs and anxious for the U.S. military to get out of Iraq, then his stock might go up with the Iraqi public. Thus, the raid on his compound and the U.S. denunciations of Chalabi, with Chalabi even more vehemently attacking the U.S.

Follow that? Anyway, I'm not sure I believe that theory, since the U.S. has moved so strongly against Chalabi to the point of accusing him of being a spy for Iran. And why would the Iraqis want a spy for Iran (its hated border-enemy for so many years) at the head of their government, Iraqi nationalist or no?

The best-case scenario for American progressives would be this one: If it can be shown that Chalabi indeed was passing classified U.S. secrets to Iran and that those intelligence reports had been furnished to him by key Bush Administration officials (Cheney? Perle? Feith? Cambone? Rumsfeld?), those U.S. neo-cons could be charged with revealing top-secret reports to a foreign power. Not good for Bush's election chances.

This might not be as far-fetched as it sounds, as we already know, from Bob Woodward's book, that Cheney and Rumsfeld showed Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., the U.S.'s top-secret war plans for Iraq prior to the invasion. So it's entirely possible that someone like Perle and his friends revealed classified intelligence to Chalabi, which, unbeknownst to them was being passed on to Iran. (The lesson is: Beware of trusting foreign "friends" -- you can get bitten in the behind later by that blind trust.)

Anyway, this deeply complex story will be unraveling for days and weeks and months -- at the same time that more photos and videos of U.S./U.K. torture will be coming out, at the same time that possible indictments will be revealed of the key figures in the Bush Administration who outed Valerie Plame as a covert CIA agent, at the same time the 9/11 commission will be issuing its final report on the Administration's failure to act on pre-9/11 knowledge. Oh, it's going to be a rich Summer and Fall in American presidential politics!

Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly passes on some truly disturbing charges against Chalabi, ones that led to U.S. troops in effect being sent into an ambush of a war:

A couple of months ago Bob Drogin of the LA Times broke the story of "Curveball," a key Iraqi informant who showed up in a German refugee camp and claimed that he had built biological warfare trucks for the Iraqi army. Only later did the CIA learn that he was actually the brother of one of Ahmed Chalabi's top aides and had probably been coached to provide false information.

Today, Drogin carries the story a step further:

Ahmad Chalabi, the onetime White House favorite who has been implicated in an alleged Iranian spy operation, sent Iraqi defectors to at least eight Western spy services before the war in an apparent effort to dupe them about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons programs, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said.

....Because even friendly spy services rarely share the identities of their informants or let outsiders meet or debrief their sources, it has only in recent months become clear that Chalabi's group sent defectors with inaccurate or misleading information to Denmark, England, Italy, France, Germany, Spain and Sweden, as well as to the United States, the officials said.

...."We had a lot of sources, but it was all coming from the same pot," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "They were all INC guys. And none of them panned out."

A U.S. official confirmed that defectors from Chalabi's organization had provided suspect information to numerous Western intelligence agencies. "It's safe to say he tried to game the system," the official said.

Those tough-minded, hardnosed, not-afraid-to-face-the-real-world neocons sure picked the wrong guy to place their faith in, didn't they? But hey -- at least Chalabi and the Iranians got exactly what they wanted: the downfall of Saddam Hussein. And Osama bin Laden got exactly what he wanted too: a Western occupying force in the heart of the Arab world to act as a recruiting device for al-Qaeda. The neocons played their assigned role in this drama to perfection.

Unfortunately, the phrase "useful idiots" is already taken, so we'll have to come up with a new one for these guys. Any ideas?

Corrente adds to the charges:

Neocon creature and Iranian spy Chalabi's disinformation campaign. Too, too delicious. Almost too rich: If it weren't for the cost in treasure and lives of Bush bungling that Chalabi enabled.

Ahmed Chalabi, the one-time White House favourite who has been implicated in an alleged Iranian spy operation, sent Iraqi defectors to at least eight Western spy services before the war in an apparent effort to dupe them about Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons programs.

US investigators are now seeking to determine if the effort was secretly supported by Iran's intelligence service to help persuade the Bush Administration to oust the Baghdad regime, Tehran's long-time enemy.

US officials say the INC may have been acting on its own, rather that at Iran's behest, when it sent out a steady stream of defectors between 1998 and 2003 with apparently coordinated claims about Baghdad's purported weapons of mass destruction.

Because even friendly spy services rarely share the identities of their informants, or let outsiders meet or debrief their sources, it has become clear only in recent months that Mr. Chalabi's group sent defectors with inaccurate or misleading information to Denmark, England, Italy...France, Germany, Spain and Sweden, as well as to the US, the officials said.

In some case US intelligence analysts used information from now-discredited "foreign intelligence sources" to corroborate their own assessments of Saddam's suspected illegal weapons. Few of the CIA's pre-war judgments have been proved accurate so far.

"We had a lot of sources, but it was all coming from the same pot," said a former senior US intelligence official.

"They were all INC guys. And none of them panned out."

Looks like the entire Bush foreign policy apparat were just babies by comparison to the Iraqi intelligence service.

Gee, I wonder if anyone in the administration will take responsibility.

Digsby quotes Richard Perle, probably Chalabi's biggest boosterman in the Bush Administration, as saying as late as a few days ago:

"The CIA despises [Ahmed] Chalabi; the State Department despises him. They did everything they could to put him out of business. Now there is a deliberate effort to marginalize him."

"He has devoted his life to freeing his country," Perle added. "He is a man of enormous intelligence, and I believe the effort to marginalize him will fail. They will end up looking ridiculous."

I don't think even Rummy could drive a wedge between those two crazy young kids in love.

Thursday's raid appeared to be a final break between Mr. Chalabi and his former US patrons. But Gen. Myers defended the INC, saying its military intelligence had been "useful and accurate" during the year-long occupation.

"The organisation that he is associated with has provided intelligence to our intelligence unit there in Baghdad that has saved soldiers' lives," he told a congressional committee.

Gen. Myers' comments reflect the personal support that Mr. Chalabi enjoys in some sections of the administration, particularly the Pentagon. However, this support has been overriden by the importance attached to the political process by Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, and Lakhdar Brahimi, United Nations special envoy to Iraq. To them, Mr. Chalabi has come to be seen as an obstacle to UN plans to form a caretaker government to assume sovereignty.

Hesiod offers:

This is stunning. The whole "get Saddam" movement among the neocons, as fueled by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress, was a front operation for the Iranians to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

No. The Neocons weren't actually intentionally working for the Iranians. That would, at least, be worthy of respect for their deviousness and cleverness. No. They were dupes. D-U-P-E-S.

The kind of folk who, in past eras here in the United States, would be pilloried by the conservative movement. People who would be decried as traitors...ad nauseum.

Now, how will the neocons and the conservatives get out of this one? Well...first they will blame Bill Clinton. They will claim that it was Clinton' intelligence agencies that started providing money to the INC and relied on them for intelligence about Iraq.

All that would be true. Except for the fact that Bill Clinton never trusted the INC. The CIA started to cut off the INC, which drew the opprobrium of the neocons (or shall we call them "Iranian dupes?").

And, frankly, Bill Clinton didn't go to war with Iraq, and depose the Hussein regime on the "strength" of faulty intelligence. So, while he was tempted, and kept his options open, he didn't fall for the scam.

What's the upshot of all of this? Well, it's that we went to war with Iraq because we allowed ourselves to get conned by the Iranians into thinking Saddam Hussein posed a threat to us.

And here's an Iraqi perspective, from River, that estimable blogger at Baghdad Burning:

...I always enjoy a good Chalabi interview. His answers to questions are always so completely antagonistic to Iraqi public opinion that the whole thing makes a delightful show - rather like a vicious Chihuahua in the midst of a dozen bulldogs. There were several amusing moments during the interview [Sunday on Al Araby TV network]. He kept waving around his arms and made numerous flourishing movements with his hands to emphasize some key points. A few interesting things I noted about the interview: he was suddenly using the word 'occupation'. During past interviews, he would never use the word 'occupation'. He used to insist on calling the invading army et al. 'coalition' and the whole fiasco was persistently labeled a 'liberation' by him and his cronies.

He made several insipid comments about the raid and his falling out with Bremer and the rest. My favorite comment was his "I've won the prize! I've won the Iraqi nationality prize…" Followed by a large grin (with several gapps between the teeth). The prize he was so proudly referring to was the disapproval of the CIA and 'occupation'. Apparently, he thinks that now that he has been blacklisted by the CPA, he will be enfolded by the tender arms of the Iraqi public. It's almost exhausting to see his endless optimism. At the same time, it's amazing to see his 'about-face' regarding his American popularity. A few months ago, his value to the Bush administration was the personal achievement he was proudest of- he never failed to flaunt his American connections.

Of course, several things occurred to us, after hearing of the raid. The first thing I thought was, "Well, it's about time…" Then, as the newws began to sink in, it made less since. Chalabi was America's lapdog- why is he suddenly unsuitable for the new Iraq? He was convicted in Jordan several years ago and everyone knows he's a crook and a terrible politician… I'm also convvinced that the Bush administration knew full well that he was highly unpopular in Iraq. He's not just a puppet - he's a mercenary. He encouraged the sanctions that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and maimed the country itself. He supported the war and occupation vehemently and fabricated lies about weapons and threats to further his cause. He's a criminal - and a lousy one at that.

In the end, America had to know that Chalabi was virtually useless. Why this sudden change of heart towards Mercenary #1? People are saying that it is a ploy to help him rise in popularity, but I can hardly believe that. Could the decision-makers currently mulling over the Iraq situation be so ridiculously optimistic? Or could they have really been so wrong in the past? We have a saying in Arabic, "En kint tedri, fe tilk musseeba… in kint la tedri, fa ill musseebatu a'adham" which means, "If you knew, then that was a catastrophe… and if you didn't know, then the catastrophe is greater."

Finally, we close with this delicious question posed by Atrios:

So, if Chalabi's group really is a front for Iranians why isn't he standing hooded in a dark room with wires hooked up to his genitals instead of, you know, being on every Sunday news show...?

May 21, 2004

Who Lost Iraq?

So FUBAR is the U.S. war in Iraq -- and we're less than six weeks away from "handover" day when a non-existent interim government is supposed to start administering the country! -- that the blame game already has started. It's called "Who Lost Iraq?"

If the Bush Administration -- which, of course, never ever makes mistakes -- can't pull a victory, or something they can call a victory, out of a magic hat, then someone is going to have to pay the price for failure. Want to guess whom it will be?

Here, as I see it, are the current scapegoat candidates, followed by Bush&Co.'s not-for-publication spin:

1. John Kerry and the liberal press and politicians in the U.S.: They never fully supported the Bush war effort in Iraq, and publicized only the worst aspects of our crusa ...make that campaign. Unpatriotic traitors.

2. John McCain: Though a Republican by party affiliation, he's been carping and criticizing our policy -- the old tactic of a thousand cuts -- and thus showed he really was settling scores with the Bush campaign, while giving Kerry ammunition. Another traitor.

3. Al Qaida: They moved their clandestine cadres into Iraq and began organizing the otherwise friendly locals into bloody insurgents. Otherwise, things would have been copasetic, or at least bearable.

4. Saddam Hussein: He dispersed his troops a year ago when U.S. victory was certain, and then activated them again -- led by his former Ba'athist officers -- once the U.S. was occupying the various cities. Shoulda sent him to Abu Ghraib.

5. Ahmed Chalabi: He was all set to be our guy in Baghdad, but for some reason was unable to galvanize the Iraqi population behind him; he began secretly trying to build his own power base -- he even met with Iranian leaders -- perhaps in anticipation of launching a coup attempt to create a government opposed to our objectives.

6. Ayatollah Sistani, and that mad monk Al-Sadr: They refused to go along with our ideas about how best to grow a democracy in Iraq; they wanted to have direct elections.

7. Hans Blix and David Kay: They didn't find any of the weapons of mass destruction the exiles told us were hidden all over the place. They probably are liberal Democrats, the bastards.

8. Kofi Annan: He kept trying to stick the United Nations' nose into our war, instead of getting on board with the program.

9. Ten million protesters before the war even started: They were deluded, probably led by Commies or Islam-lovers, and put pressure on a number of governments not to support the war.

10. Old Europe: They were so mean and nasty to us, telling us in public that we were making a bad mistake, that Iraq was a quagmire in the making, and so wouldn't participate. The French were the worst, along with the Germans and now the Spanish -- and probably those damn Italians coming up. Luckily, we can count on New Europe -- all those old former Commie states, anxious to do business with us -- and, of course, on good ol' Tony Blair, whose nose couldn't be higher up our you-know-what. What a brave, loyal puppy.

11. A Few Bad Apples: A few of the troops guarding the prisoners at a few jails in Iraq got carried away and hazed some of the terror suspects. We will make sure they are punished and that the Iraqis and everyone else in the region knows we Americans don't do things like that.

12. Photo leakers: If nobody has sent the goddamn photos over the internet, nobody would know, or care, about prisoners being abused and who authorized the harsh interrogation policy. Idiots.

13. Bill Clinton: Um, he was...he said...well, he must have had a hand in it, somewhere.

14. John Kerry, the liberal press, John McCain, Al Qaida, Saddam, Ahmed Chalabi, some Islamic monks, Blix and Kay, Kofi, the bloody French, A Few Bad Apples, the photo-leakers, Bill Clinton: We had a great plan, we made no mistakes, everyone else screwed it up.

Granted, it is a bit early for the "Who Lost Iraq?" game to be played full force. But the preliminary rounds are getting underway. Check out Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo blog):

...[Notice the] increasing velocity and ferocity of war-hawks trying to shift the blame for their own goofs by inventing a new stab-in-the-back theory...to cushion their consciences from the brunt of recognizing the dire pass to which their own foolishness and reckless zeal have brought their country.

The chief example I've seen -- though there must be many others -- is John Podhoretz's column in The New York Post from last Friday, May 14th.

The column is a string of accusations. The first is against The New York Times for, according to Podhoretz, blaming the United States, rather than his murderers, for Nick Berg's death. "The Times," writes Podhoretz, in concluding this section of his piece, "is leading the mainstream media in turning the United States into the bad guys in Iraq."

...At length, the column concludes with these four grafs:

"So let's be clear what's going on here. As we speak, 138,000 Americans are
serving under dangerous conditions in Iraq. And our forces in Karbala are fighting against the goons and thugs of Muqtada al-Sadr with some success. They're risking their lives for freedom and honor and duty and love of country.

"And conventional liberal opinion wants them to lose.

"Conventional liberal opinion believes that the Abu Ghraib photos are the true meaning of the war, and that Nick Berg is just another victim of callous U.S. policy.

"Conventional liberal opinion is actively seeking the humiliation and defeat of the United States in Iraq."

[Marshall continues:] Let's be a little more clear about what's going on here. Having led the country perilously close to humiliation and defeat, the architects of the war want to shift the blame for what's happened to their opponents who either said the whole thing was a mistake in the first place or criticized the incompetence of its execution as it unfolded. They take the blame, the moral accountability, by 'wishing' for a bad result. That at least is Podhoretz's reasoning.

If ever there was an example of moral up-is-downism, this is it. And claiming that their political opponents -- liberal, in Podhoretz's usage here, is just a catch-all -- want defeat and humiliation for their country is certainly the most gutterish sort of slander there is.

There's something almost uncomfortable about watching the mix of desperation, panicked zeal and projection evidenced in Podhoretz's column. It's like the pornography of watching someone beg for his life or shift the blame onto someone else when they've been caught in the act -- with the added twist of spasms of aggression mixed in. But on a broader level, it's in character. Not for Podhoretz -- this isn't at all directed at him as a person -- but for the movement, the crew, he's part of and is trying to defend.

How'd we get into this? After 50 years of pretty consistently prudential foreign policy, managed mostly on a consensus of bipartisan agreement (yes, there are exceptions, but by and large, true), they decided to bet the national ranch on an idea. Actually it was a series of ideas, wrapped together in an odd tangle that could look like an odd jumble when viewed from outside. The key, however, was betting the national ranch on steep odds.

Only, they weren't confident the country would get behind such a riverboat gamble. So they lied about what they were doing. They didn't trust the people -- which might be an epitaph we should return to.

Now, what do we expect of people who make reckless gambles with other people's money? Of people who can't discipline themselves enough to distinguish between their hopes and reality? What do you expect of that ne'er-do-well relative who's always hitting you up for a loan because he's come up with a sure thing?

Do you expect those sorts of folks to take responsibility when things go bad? Or do you expect them to blame others?

Character, alas, really does count.

Kevin Drum www.washingtonmonthly.com takes a look at the battle scene in Iraq and comes up with some interesting questions:

...Some military officers are also concerned that Washington is now cutting back on its original goal of eliminating major flash points in Iraq before June 30. They say the United States has basically retreated in Fallujah, handing over control of the Sunni city to a former Iraqi general who is now commanding some of the very insurgents U.S. forces were fighting -- again, in the name of expediency.

"What we're trying to do is extricate ourselves from Fallujah," said a senior U.S. official familiar with U.S. strategy who would speak only on the condition of anonymity. "There's overwhelming pressure with the Coalition Provisional Authority and the White House to deliver a successful Iraq transition, and Iraq is proving uncooperative."

This is via Andrew Sullivan, who asks, "is the president telling the truth or is the anonymous 'senior administration official'?"

I wonder how much more of this it takes before people like Sullivan stop asking this question and see the obvious answer. Sure, other things equal, Bush would like to win the war, but his every action for the past year has shown that he's not willing to risk reelection to do it. He got talked into the neocon dreamland in which Iraq would be a quick and easy war, and now he just wants a face-saving — and job saving — way of getting out. .

Aside from lots of pretty speeches, I can't think of a single action he's taken in the past 12 months that indicates any real seriousness about winning in Iraq. Anybody out there care to suggest anything?

Steve Guilliard takes a longer look at Sy Hersh's blockbuster New Yorker article.

Congential liars

It's been a long few days, and the mistakes and outright lies running through the news have been astounding. The lies about Iraq reminds me of a line from Apocalypse Now: "The bullshit flew so fast, you needed wings to stay above it.".

There was no program named "copper green"? [The Pentagon denied the existence of the program mentioned in Hersh's report.] Please. Sy Hersh isn't Jayson Blair, sorry. If he claims there was a program, it existed. Not that he was hurt by the useless whining assholes at CounterPunch, and the besotted Christopher 'hic" Hitchens. The White House can issue all the non-denial denials they want, they have no credibility left. Anyone who would trust the word of Bush is either a sucker or a fool.

Then, of course, you have the generals lying, or at least obfuscating what is going on. If Rick Sanchez feels so bad about Abu Ghraib, he can retire. He certainly should do more than say he's sorry. If someone fucked his kid in the ass with a cylume light, he might want more than words,

No one wants to be responsible. They claim responsibility, because words are cheap, but to be responsible, which would require atonement, to sand niggers no less, isn't going to come easy. Cliff May, one of these think-tank assholes who litter cable news, he wanted to know if the Red Cross went to Iran and Syria to check their jails. And I was stunned. Are these our new moral comparisons? Theocracies and dictatorships? What's the point? That because Syria tortures, we get to torture too?

I think not.

Now, we just shot up another Iraqi wedding. With 45 dead. Women and children included. People forget that our war routinely kills the innocent. Abu Ghraib is merely the very thick icing on a very large cake. Of course, the Pentagon is lying again. Claiming they were attacking foreign fighters, yet another gun-firing wedding party is shot up by a helo.

They are lying about who will run Iraq as well. The head of the IGC was blown to shit going into the Green Zone. Do they think that the next guy they pick won't get blown up the same way? The fact that they have to guess who will be Johnny on the spot shouldn't make anyone feel happy.

These lies are truly disheartening, because it seems everyone is pretending the obvious didn't happen. Something very wrong happened at Abu Ghraib which started in Washington. Yet, we never get straight answers from anyone. Just resign now, tell the truth and be done with it. Don't drag it out. It will all come out in the end anyway.

Atrios comes up with a nugget of a piece:

Quotes You Won't Read Here

I understand that the foreign news frequently places a different emphasis on the US News and it isn't always evidence of their superiority. However, this is from testimony to the Senate yesterday about the Most Important War Ever. And, at least using Google News, I can't find a damn thing on it domestically. From the Guardian:

"I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure. We are looking into the abyss," General Joseph Hoar, a former commander in chief of US central command, told the Senate foreign relations committee.

...Larry Diamond, an analyst at the conservative Hoover Institution, said: "I think it's clear that the United States now faces a perilous situation in Iraq.

"We have failed to come anywhere near meeting the post-war expectations of
Iraqis for security and post-war reconstruction.

"There is only one word for a situation in which you cannot win and you cannot withdraw - quagmire."

...General Hoar was equally scathing about the calibre of the Bush administration. "The policy people in both Washington and Baghdad," he said, "have demonstrated their inability to do a job on a day-to-day basis this past year."

Juan Cole quotes the Washington Post's Daniel Williams as wondering whether the Iraq experiment can be salvaged. Cole says "the article is one of the more clear-eyed I have seen":

"We could not imagine the deterioration leading to such a point. It's getting worse day after day, and no one has been able to put an end to it. Who is going to protect the next government, no matter what kind it is?" said Abdul Jalil Mohsen, a former Iraqi general and member of the Iraqi National Accord .

"There's no question: A small band of people can paralyze the country," said Mahmoud Othman, an independent Kurdish member of the council. "They are armed and organized and this is the difficulty. The people who did this have no respect for anything of value. It's a real danger to Iraq, the Iraqis and to an agenda to achieve any kind of democracy." '

"Just look around," said Bakran Ohan, who sells baby clothes. "Do you see any police? Any soldiers? There is a complete lack of security. It won't change from day to night on June 30." '

[Gen.] Kimmit denied that the Italians had retreated [from Nasiriyah]. "They just moved to a more secure camp," he said. '

One thing Williams does not bring up [Cole writes] is the degree to which much of the turmoil is the direct result of poor American decision-making. The decision to dissolve the Iraqi army. The decision to try to arrest Muqtada al-Sadr. Decisions, the rationale of which most observers would have difficulty seeing. The whole Iraq enterprise has been run from the beginning as a plot, with no transparency and all kinds of ulterior motives, and that is what has sunk it.

Another post by Cole:

Poll: Muqtada Second Most Popular Politician in Iraq

Roula Khalaf of the Financial Times reports the results of a poll of 1600 Iraqis from all major ethnic groups.

The results confirm that radical young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is holed up in Najaf as his militiamen fight the Americans, has emerged as among the more popular politicians in Iraq, already suggested by a poll done in late March and reported in the Washington Post.

"Respondents saw Mr Sadr as the second most influential figure in Iraq, next only to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most senior Shia cleric. Some 32 per cent of respondents said they strongly supported Mr Sadr and another 36 per cent said they somewhat supported him. Ibrahim Jaafari, the head of the Shia Islamist Daawa party and a member of the governing council, came next on the list."

Nearly 90 percent of Iraqis surveyed saw the US troops as occupiers, not liberators. This is up from 20 percent in October of 2003 and 47 percent in January, 2004.

Enough on the war. Corrente posts this one about the power behind the Bush throne, Karl Rove:

Taking Things Personally

The delightful column to which I am about to link you is not my find; that honor belongs to the Farmer, who is busy tending to more earthly matters, (of the daily bread, production of variety), and thus asked if I might wish to blog upon it.

The intriguing title of the column by Tom Blackburn of the Palm Beach Post is "A girl gave Rove a bloody nose," which refers to a story Mr. Rove told as part of a commencement talk he gave at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. Mr. Blackburn gives us the AP version of that story:

"At the age of 9, I put a Nixon bumper sticker on my wire basket in the front of my bicycle. Unfortunately, the little Catholic girl down the street was a couple of years and about 20 pounds on me. She was for Kennedy. When she saw me on my bike with my bumper sticker for Nixon, she put me on the ground, flattened me out and gave me a bloody nose."

Mr. Blackburn then goes on to comment:

That's supposed to be a cute story about the man who enjoys being called

"Bush's brain" bleeding for Republican Richard Nixon at the age of 9. But why did his assailant have to be a Catholic? Is the implication supposed to be that no one else would stick up for a Catholic running for president? It is, despite the plain historical fact that John F. Kennedy wouldn't have been elected if his votes came only from Catholics.

But Mr. Rove's bully had to be a Catholic, not a generic American. She was
undoubtedly Irish, which would make her a brawler, although Mr. Rove didn't spell it out. With that audience, he didn't have to; the Liberty graduates could fill in the blank.

The point I take from the story -- even though Mr. Rove didn't intend it -- is that at a tender age, Mr. Rove was attracted to the kind of politician who leaves office one step ahead of the impeachment posse. For that point, the girl didn't have to be Catholic. For Mr. Rove's intended point, though, she had to be Catholic because the politics he preaches and practices is "us against them," and there weren't likely to be many Catholic "thems" in the Liberty audience.

Mr. Blackburn takes what Mr. Rove was doing personally, and in the process of explaining why, gives us a stirring defense of the separation of state and religion.

May 17, 2004

Rumsfeld Is Getting Spooked

You don't want to piss off the spooks.

Bush&Co. signed its own unfolding death warrant when it made the intelligence agencies -- especially the CIA, FBI and DIA -- the fall guys for what went wrong in a number of sensitive areas, especially on Iraq and the pre-9/11 period. And when Rove and Cheney, for purposes of political revenge, orchestrated the outing of a covert CIA agent, Bush&Co. sealed their doom.

The spooks know where the bodies are buried, and they don't mind exhuming them for maximum effect against the whole neo-con lot in the White House and Pentagon.

The latest revelation, of course -- based on leaks to The New Yorker's Seymour Hersh -- is that Rumsfeld himself ordered the harsh-interrogation program. These revelations bring the crimes of Abu Ghraib (and at other U.S. facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere) closer to the White House. But they also open Rumsfeld and his lieutenant, Stephen Cambone, to possible criminal charges of perjury before Congress.

Note: It's long been common knowledge that Rumsfeld was one of the founders (along with Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, et al.) of The Project for The New American Century -- the extreme rightwing outfit that in the '90s urged, after there was no other superpower to stop the U.S., a policy of aggressive ("pre-emptive") wars, starting with Iraq. But what many don't know is that Cambone, now the head intelligence guy in Rumsfeld's office, helped write the key PNAC document that set out the aggrandizing policies and goals for U.S. foreign/military policy.

It looks like Rumsfeld will have to go, sooner rather than later. His problems may help explain why Bush lathered him with so much praise last week (a superb Secretary of Defense, a true patriot, etc.), even in the face of the unfolding Iraq-torture stories. Bush wanted to make sure Rummy kept his mouth shut about other Bush&Co. crimes. (Rumsfeld must know that even though he's going to take a whole lot of public relations heat, and face possible criminal charges, a pardon is awaiting in the wings -- IF Bush manages to remain in office.)

So many of Bush&Co.'s wounds are self-inflicted, and stem from their desire for absolute control and absolute secrecy. If you want to read the grisly details, be sure to check out John W. Dean's "Worse Than Watergate" book.

For example, when the FBI and CIA and DIA couldn't and wouldn't produce the intelligence that backed up Bush&Co.'s claims about Iraq's alleged WMDs and supposed ties to Al Qaida, Rumsfeld set up his own intelligence-gathering agency, the Office of Special Plans, stocked it with political appointees of the PNAC persuasion, and, lo and behold, got the "intelligence" he wanted, which was used to manipulate the Congress and American people into approving the war plans.

Now the chickens are coming home to roost, and the only question is whether throwing Rumsfeld overboard will protect the rest of the rotten crew in the White House. Dust off those impeachment statutes, we're in for one hell of a political ride.

Digsby sums up Seymour Hersh's newest smoking-gun story on Rumsfeld:

Seymour Hersh's latest reveals the existence of a black operation put into high gear after 9/11 that was stupidly pushed into Iraq due to frustration and impatience at the Pentagon.

First, let me say that I am not all that surprised that such a program existed nor that it was given greater ability to operate independently after 9/11. As Hersh points out, these clandestine operations had been used during the cold war and I certainly assumed that dealing with the asymmetrical threat of terrorism would probably require at least some element of high risk spook-style activity. It would be naive to think it wouldn't. In the hands of these unbelievable incompetents in the Bush administration, it naturally turned into a complete disaster.

Moral questions aside (and there are many), as the article details, the problem is that if you use these techniques in anything but the most secret and rarest of ways and it comes into the hands of regular people instead of highly trained specialists using real intelligence, then it is not only ineffective in obtaining useful information, it is dramatically counterproductive in terms of compromising long-term policy goals.

The CIA sources, perhaps covering their asses, tell Hersh that even they backed off of this stuff when it came to using it against regular people in Iraq. Some in the Pentagon apparently maintain that they had been getting good intelligence on the insurgency using these harsh measures until the "hillbillys" got involved and took pictures, which I find hard to believe. If anything the insurgency got stronger over the period they were sweeping innocent people off the streets and then torturing them in prisons, so it doesn't track that they were really getting anywhere. In fact, it looks as if it may have contributed to the US military's problems. If they mean that they managed to get Saddam, I hardly think that was such a big coup. After all, he had terrorized the population for over 30 years so it's not unlikely that someone would have dropped a dime on him eventually.

The fact is that these torture techniques in anybody's hands are a terrible way to get information. People will say anything under torture. I suspect that the "historical information" that General Ripper is so proud of obtaining in Gitmo is probably bullshit. Certainly, after being down there for more than 2 years those prisoners don't know shit today. Believing their own hype about Gitmo, these people inexorably came to believe that if they just inflicted a little more pain and humiliation in Iraq they'd get the answers they wanted. Meanwhile, bin Laden is still at large and Iraq has blown up into a nightmare.

So, it is a case of macho overstepping and making things worse than they already were, much as the march to Iraq itself was a case of macho overstepping and making things worse rather than better. Evidently, the events of 9/11 released some testosterone rush in the pinched, unfulfilled systems of the ivory tower neocons and they lost the ability to reason and plan.

Hersh's article pretty much confirms that the person who gave the orders to take off the gloves in Abu Ghraib is Don Rumsfeld gofer, Steven Cambone, the man most uniquely unqualified to hold his office since well ... President Bush. Of course, Cambone being the ultimate micromanager's clerk means that Rummy himself was well aware of everything that went on and approved it.

It's becoming more and more obvious that the White House was intimately involved in these issues, regardless of their plausible deniability....One of the main reasons they wanted to create the "unlawful combatant" designation was to allow unfettered interrogations. The White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, led that argument...

And Billmon weighs in from another angle:

Sy Hersh blows the cover -- all of it -- off the real story behind Abu Ghraib. And it's about as bad as I had expected - maybe even a little worse.

...The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq.

One book that was frequently cited was "The Arab Mind," a study of Arab culture and psychology, first published in 1973, by Raphael Patai, a cultural anthropologist who taught at, among other universities, Columbia and Princeton, and who died in 1996.

The book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. "The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women . . . and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world," Patai wrote. Homosexual activity, "or any indication of homosexual leanings, as with all other expressions of sexuality, is never given any publicity. These are private affairs and remain in private."

The Patai book, an academic told me, was "the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior." In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged: "one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation."

And Atrios notes that Sy Hersh is not the only source here. He quotes Newsweek's backgrounder:

The Bush administration created a bold legal framework to justify this system of interrogation, according to internal government memos obtained by Newsweek. What started as a carefully thought-out, if aggressive, policy of interrogation in a covert war—designed mainly for use by a handful of CIA professionals—evolved into ever-more ungoverned tactics that ended up in the hands of untrained MPs in a big, hot war. Originally, Geneva Conventions protections were stripped only from Qaeda and Taliban prisoners. But later Rumsfeld himself, impressed by the success of techniques used against Qaeda suspects at Guantánamo Bay, seemingly set in motion a process that led to their use in Iraq, even though that war was supposed to have been governed by the Geneva Conventions. Ultimately, reservist MPs, like those at Abu Ghraib, were drawn into a system in which fear and humiliation were used to break prisoners' resistance to interrogation.

..The administration also began "rendering"—or delivering terror suspects to foreign governments for interrogation. Why? At a classified briefing for senators not long after 9/11, CIA Director George Tenet was asked whether Washington was going to get governments known for their brutality to turn over Qaeda suspects to the United States. Congressional sources told Newsweek that Tenet suggested it might be better sometimes for such suspects to remain in the hands of foreign authorities, who might be able to use more aggressive interrogation methods. By 2004, the United States was running a covert charter airline moving CIA prisoners from one secret facility to another, sources say. The reason? It was judged impolitic (and too traceable) to use the U.S. Air Force.

...Toward the end of 2002, orders came down the political chain at DOD that the Geneva Conventions were to be reinterpreted to allow tougher methods of interrogation. "There was almost a revolt" by the service judge advocates general, or JAGs, the top military lawyers who had originally allied with Powell against the new rules, says a knowledgeable source. The JAGs, including the lawyers in the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Richard Myers, fought their civilian bosses for months—but finally lost. In April 22003, new and tougher interrogation techniques were approved.

Covertly, though, the JAGs made a final effort. They went to see Scott Horton, a specialist in international human-rights law and a major player in the New York City Bar Association's human-rights work. The JAGs told Horton they could only talk obliquely about practices that were classified. But they said the U.S. military's 50-year history of observing the demands of the Geneva Conventions was now being overturned. "There is a calculated effort to create an atmosphere of legal ambiguity" about how the conventions should be interpreted and applied, they told Horton. And the prime movers in this effort, they told him, were DOD Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith and DOD general counsel William Haynes. There was, they warned, "a real risk of a disaster" for U.S. interests.

And, finally, Juan Cole has a go:

Sy Hersh's expose of an ultra-secret unit of two hundred inside the Pentagon is probably the nail in the coffin of Rumsfeld's tenure at the Department of Defense, and may well be a factor in the presidential elections.

Disturbingly, Sen. Joe Lieberman endorsed torture as an information extraction mechanism on Wolf Blitzer's show on Sunday. He gave the tired example of whether, if one of the 9/11 hijackers had fallen into US hands, one wouldn't have wanted all means used to extract information about the coming attack? There are several things wrong with this stance. First, torture does not work, and there is no evidence that it worked at Abu Ghuraib. Second, the argument that the ends justify the means always turns human beings into monsters. If something is morally wrong, you don't do it if you hope to remain a moral society. Society would be a lot safer if all known heads of identified criminal organizations were taken out by police snipers. We don't do that. Why? Sen. Lieberman should think about it. That way lies a descent into barbarity before which September 11 would pale.

We Americans either stand for something or we don't. What I always assumed we stood for was the US Constitution. Our State Department annually rates other countries by how well their record stacks up against the US Bill of Rights. That custom seems an implicit admission that we hold these rights and values to be universal, not limited to US soil or only a privilege of citizens. And here is what the founding generation of Americans thought about Abu Ghuraib and torture:

Article 10: "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted."

And about those confounded Geneva Conventions, which keep getting in the way of the U.S. doing whatever the hell it wants, Hesiod notes:

Umm...I hate to tell the Bush administration, but while the Geneva Conventions may not apply to our Al Qaeda captives, the International Convention against Torture may. And yes, the United States is a signatory of the convention...(We also passed a federal statute outlawing it, and assigning severe criminal penalties.) Here are the first four articles, which I think we can safely say, have been repeatedly violated as a matter of POLICY by the Bush administration.

Article 1

1. For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider application.

Article 2

1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.

2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.

Article 3

1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.

2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

Article 4

1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.

2. Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature."

May 10, 2004

Listening to Rumsfeld's Congressional testimony the other day was like hearing a bad, warped record.

The Bush Administration, once again caught up in a major scandal of its own devising, is running the old scam that has worked for it so many times before. First you deny you knew of the problem; then you assert that once you did know, you were appalled and took immediate measures to correct the situation; then, to take the pressure off and to reduce the glare of bad publicity, you call on "the system" to do its investigatory work of many months. If things heat up, you announce that you're going to appoint an "independent" commission to investigate, one you pack with friendlies who won't dig too deeply. In the meantime, you throw a few tiny fish overboard and hope that will satisfy the sharks. If that doesn't work, you throw a bigger fish overboard, maybe a general or head of department. And, if that doesn't do it, you make a Cabinet member walk the plank.

Short of sacrificing the senior officers and the Secretary of Defense, we've witnessed all of those stages now with regard to the Iraq torture scandal. The first, and continuing, line of defense is: This is just an "aberration," a few "bad apples." We'll try them and convict them, and move on.

But, whoops, there's too much evidence confirming that these MPs and guards were not operating on their own, but were instructed and ordered by their superiors to harass, abuse, humiliate and brutalize those detainees in their charge. Here are just three places to start (here and here and here) -- confessions by some of the guards in question.

These orders (as the euphemous military language goes) to "soften them up" came down from top officers in Iraq after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the head honcho of the notorious detainee camp at Guantánamo visited the U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and ordered the MPs to act as "an enabler for interrogation," Taguba's report found. Miller, unbelievably, is the new guy in charge of the Abu Ghraib prison.

Are we supposed to believe that the head generals in Iraq, at some point knowledgeable about what was happening in the various jails and prisons under their control, were acting totally on their own, and never checked with the Pentagon about these ongoing interrogation policies and the scandals that were likely to result from them? That Rumsfeld and Myers, and Cheney and Bush, knew nothing about what was going on?

Paul Bremer was told of the abuse allegations in November of 2003 ; the International Red Cross and other human-rights groups had been ringing loud alarm bells for more than a year; they knew what was happening, the Iraqis knew what was happening to their sons and daughters, lots of Americans emailed back home what was happening, even various Army investigations revealed what was happening.

But Rumsfeld, the loyal soldier, fell on his sword before Congress and said that even though he learned of the abuses in January, he never told Bush anything about all this, and neither did he tell the appropriate Congressional leaders. What were he and Gen. Myers thinking, that the photos would never get out? (If true, they should resign for stupidity, if nothing else.)

Myers, it turns out, contacted CBS in mid-April, two weeks before the whole mess exploded, and asked them not to run the photos, so Myers and Rumsfeld knew the photos were out there in the public realm, but decided to do nothing. They also knew of General Taguba's devastating report on Abu Ghraib, and that it had been leaked. They knew that the established interrogation policy included using guards to "soften up" the prisoners for interrogation. But about all these explosive matters, they did and said nothing.

And then it all blew up in their faces, as it should have, thanks largely to Sy Hersh at The New Yorker and 60 Minutes II. So what does Rumsfeld tell Congress (under oath, by the way, so he's liable for perjury)? He throws them some little fishes, deflects questions about int

Bernard Weiner's Blogs -- The Archives

May 31, 2004

Maybe, and maybe not. But next, here's a report from The Guardian :

That's how bad its gotten. Go ahead and rake our administration over the coals if you want to. Just don't say anything bad about Junior. (Voters don't know that the president is responsible for the whole executive branch so they won't hold it against him.)...

RIP, Gray Lady.

And Atrios logs in:

...to be fair, Left I does highlight one place where Okrent gets it exactly right.

Until editors and reporters are willing to internalize the basic idea that anonymous sources must be outed when they're caught lying, they should not be used.

May 28, 2004

May 24, 2004

May 21, 2004

Who Lost Iraq?

May 17, 2004

Bernard Weiner's Blogs -- The Archives

May 31, 2004

Maybe, and maybe not. But next, here's a report from The Guardian :

That's how bad its gotten. Go ahead and rake our administration over the coals if you want to. Just don't say anything bad about Junior. (Voters don't know that the president is responsible for the whole executive branch so they won't hold it against him.)...

RIP, Gray Lady.

And Atrios logs in: ...to be fair, Left I does highlight one place where Okrent gets it exactly right.

Until editors and reporters are willing to internalize the basic idea that anonymous sources must be outed when they're caught lying, they should not be used.

May 28, 2004

May 24, 2004

May 21, 2004Who Lost Iraq?

May 17, 2004

And Atrios logs in:

...to be fair, Left I does highlight one place where Okrent gets it exactly right.

May 21, 2004

Who Lost Iraq?