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The History of "Media-Military-Industrial Complex" concept

MIC ("Military-Industrial Complex") is a general term for the cooperative relationship between the military and the industrial producers of military equipment and supplies in lobbying for increased spending on military programs. It actually nor limited to armament industry and is applicable to any corporation for which a significant part of revenue comes from the government contracts.  The U.S. armaments industry today is different then it was when Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell speech (Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation) famously warned Americans to beware the "military-industrial complex."  By the time Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of a military-industrial complex in his farewell address, the complex was already a reality. Ike wanted to say, "Congressional-industrial- military complex," but his advisors convinced him to delete any reference to the "honorable ones," this in spite of their penchant for both hidden and open bribery.

While far from historic high (reached during World War II, when it represented 20% of the civilian workforce) it still employs 2.2 million people, about 2% of the civilian workforce. But what is more important that it  spends up to 50% of all taxes:

In Fiscal Year 1999 the Department of Defense awarded $118 billion to contractors for goods and services. The "Big Three" in the defense industry -- Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon -- alone accounted for 26% of all defense contracts in FY'99.

In fiscal year 2003 the United States Government will spend on the military  more than all the rest of the countries on Earth combined. Current expenditures are 437 billion and our past obligations are 339 billion, this equals 776 billion. 46% of our Taxes go to the Military Industrial Complex: http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm.This figure doesn't even begin to account for all of the off-budget, black projects, homeland security nor the 40+ billion the United States Government will spend on intelligence in 2003. -- Mark Elsis Lovearth, Jan. 8, 2002

If the ability to anticipate future dangers for the nation is the mark of a truly great president then Dwight D. Eisenhower is the greatest president of the XX century. Dwight Eisenhower's presidency is probably better remembered less for what he did than for what he said while heading for the exit. In a nationally televised address on January 17, 1961, only four days before John F. Kennedy's inaugural, Eisenhower warned of the dangers of "undue influence" exerted by the "military-industrial complex."

But in really his was much more then undue influences, it was  actually a grave threat to democracy. The real danger is that the victor in WWII becomes that same as defeated side -- in most extreme forms MIC can transform the state into totalitarian nightmare: "WAR IS PEACE. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength."  Abstracting from the ideological bent, totalitarian regimes like USSR (or China) can be viewed as examples of MIC dominance in the form of merger with the state, a variant of George Orwell's "doublespeak" future depicted in his famous novel "1984".  In this sense Nazi Germany won WWII.

Eisenhower cautioned that maintaining a large, permanent military establishment was "new in the American experience," and suggested that an "engaged citizenry" offered the only effective defense against the "misplaced power" of the military-industrial lobby. But the problem with his warning was that after the second World War to dismantle permanent military establishment was an impossible task. In a sense the key result of the second World War was the establishment of the rule of military industrial complex. Here is a relevant quote from his famous speech:

Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance, or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology -- global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger is poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle -- with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in newer elements of our defense; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research -- these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs -- balance between the private and the public economy, balance between cost and hoped for advantage -- balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration.

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well, in the face of stress and threat. But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. I mention two only.

IV.

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.

In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present

• and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientifictechnological elite.

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system -- ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

V.

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

VI.

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield.

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war -- as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years -- I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight.

Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road.

As radio personality Don Imus once said of top news chiefs, "They write the news for their friends." In view of MMI danger the quote might modified into "They write the news for their government handlers." As Oscar Wilde's once noted: "The truth is seldom pure and never simple".  Press still commands enormous influence and some level of respect. But the trend is not favorable. The modern joke that people who write to the editor of the mainstream newspaper sighing "Respectfully ..."  should consult a psychiatrist have some grain of truth in it.  It also vividly shows that respect for editors of newspapers might be going the way of  dinosaurs.

Old News ;-)

Republicans: To the Manor Born

September 26, 2009 | Brad DeLong

Paul Campos:

CAMPOS: America, after all, is a meritocracy, not an aristocracy. We have no princes of the royal blood, and whatever position a person enjoys in life must be earned. This, indeed, is the basis for one of the most common criticisms of affirmative action.... On the other hand, you have the career of William Kristol. Kristol, the son of neo-conservative doyen Irving Kristol, was just fired by The New York Times.... Nothing illustrated Kristol's influence and importance better than the Times' decision to add him to their Op-Ed page. As his previous stint at Time magazine had already demonstrated, Kristol was a horrible columnist. His writing was boring, he made a lot of factual errors and his point of view was invariably about as surprising as that of a member of Stalin's Politburo. His work was, in the cruel but fair judgment of Salon's Glenn Greenwald, "sloppy, error-plagued and incomparably hackish."

So how did he end up with such a sweet gig? (Especially given that the Times already employed an incomparably more talented conservative columnist in the person of David Brooks.) The answer goes back to Farley's observation about the extreme nepotism of the contemporary right-wing media machine. Kristol may be an utter mediocrity, but he's an extraordinarily well-connected utter mediocrity.... Which brings me to this charming vignette, courtesy of blog commenter Harry Hopkins:

I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.'

Many Republicans today have a different take on the desirability of meritocracy.

[Sep 11, 2009] 9-11 Our Truth, and Theirs -- by Justin Raimondo

"The "official" 9/11 narrative doesn't make sense"

Antiwar.com

The "official" 9/11 narrative doesn't make sense

On September 11, 2001, nineteen hijackers, wielding nothing more lethal than box-cutters, commandeered four airliners, and turned them into lethal missiles, three of which managed to hit their targets – the World Trade Center and the Pentagon – while a fourth crashed in a field before it could strike its intended target — the White House. One of the hijackers had been in the United States since the mid-1990s, and the others, according to subsequent investigations, entered, exited, and re-entered the United States regularly starting in 2000.

In the years and months prior to 9/11, the terrorists remained undetected: there was not a hint, and certainly no warning, that we were about to experience the worst terrorist attack in our history. In spite of all the billions spent on "anti-terrorism" programs during the Clinton years, and the combined efforts of our intelligence community and those of our allies’, Mohammed Atta and his cohorts managed to evade detection until the day they emblazoned their vengeance across the sky and pulled off the biggest terrorist attack in US history. 

That, at least, is the official story. As to what the real story is – well, we’re not allowed to ask. 

President Obama’s "green czar," one Van Jones, was recently pressured into resigning. His crime? He had once signed a letter originating with one of the "9/11 Truth" organizations calling for a new investigation of the terrorist attacks. No, he hadn’t declared that 9/11 was an "inside job," as some of the more flamboyant "truthers" assert: indeed, he hadn’t challenged any one specific aspect of the official story. All he had asked for was a new investigation – and once this got out (thanks to Fox News nut-job Glenn Beck), he was shown the door.

This is the way our society deals with uncomfortable questions about "official" explanations for the inexplicable – by purging all dissenters, and even anybody who asks a question without necessarily having a ready-made answer. To the stake with them! Burn the heretics! Move along,  nothing to see here – and don’t ask questions unless you want to completely marginalize yourself, lose your job, and be subjected to an intensive hate campaign.

We are asked to believe that 19 men, armed with the most basic weapons, somehow managed to elude the biggest, most expensively-accoutered intelligence apparatus in the world — and the intelligence agencies of our allies, to boot. Utilizing nothing but box-cutters and the knowledge gleaned from a few weeks at flight school, these supermen somehow managed to steer those planes into two of the most visible potential terrorist targets in the US, one of which had been successfully targeted by terrorists before. They did this with no help from any foreign intelligence agency, no nation-state in on the plot, and they did it for less than $100,000. 

Really?

The more distance in time from the actual event, the odder such an assertion seems. Eight years to the day, the official account of 9/11 seems more anemic –and inadequate – than ever. Yet anyone who questions the official story – the narrative of 19 Arab dudes going on what would seem to be a rather quixotic jihad, haphazardly making their way through a strange foreign country on their own, all the while readying themselves for The Day That Changed History – is denounced as a "conspiracy theorist," a crackpot, and worse.

Of course, some of the people who challenge the official story are, indeed, crackpots: they think some kind of "controlled demolition" took place inside the World Trade Center, and that no plane hit the Pentagon. 

This is very convenient for enforcers of the Official Truth: it’s easy to write these people off as nutso, and even easier to tar everyone who questions crucial aspects of the approved narrative with the same broad brush. 

More critical minds, however, will not be deterred, and will certainly home in on the many discrepancies and holes in the official version of events, as well as the central implausibility of the whole affair, which is this: those nineteen hijackers simply could not have pulled it off without outside assistance of some sort, by which I mean to say help from a foreign power acting covertly in this country. The sheer complexity of the operation would no doubt have been enough to deter anyone, even al-Qaeda, from launching it in the first place: the sheer odds against it succeeding were simply too great.  There had to have been some form of outside assistance – outside al-Qaeda, that is – for the plot to have gone as far as it did right up until zero hour: and I believe there was, because there is plenty of evidence that strongly suggests it.

A few weeks after 9/11, I was the first – and, as far as I know, only – writer to draw attention to the fact that, along with the thousand or so Muslims rounded up in the wake of the attacks, as many as 200 Israelis were also taken into custody by then Attorney General John Ashcroft and the feds. The subhead in the Washington Post story was quite explicit that these guys weren’t picked up for ordinary visa violations: "Government calls Several Cases ‘of Special Interest,’ Meaning Related to Post-Attacks Investigation."

What, I wondered, was the Israeli connection to 9/11? In any case, from that point on it was a legitimate question to ask, and, indeed, unknown to me, the news department over at Fox News was asking it — and, a few weeks after my column appeared, they answered it. 

In an astonishing four-part series on Israeli spying in the US, top Fox News reporter Carl Cameron detailed how Israeli agents on American soil had tracked the hijackers, as they moved amongst us, and, in addition, had launched what appeared to be a wide-ranging and quite aggressive intelligence-collection operation directed at US government offices across the country. The allegations contained in his report were denied – and the story (which soon disappeared from the Fox News web site) was never followed up, but Cameron’s reportage haunts us today, and mocks us from the archives where it has been gathering dust for eight years. "Since September 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations," reported Cameron:

"A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States. There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are ‘tie-ins.’ But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, ‘evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.’"

Over the next three nights, Cameron detailed the existence of an underground Israeli army in the US armed with a dazzling array of hi-tech spying devices and techniques that enabled them to penetrate our vital communications, including those utilized by law enforcement. His reports also described the consequences for any law enforcement officials who dared raise questions about this: their careers, Cameron told us, would be effectively over. 

Cameron’s reporting was viewed by millions. Of course, the Israelis and our own government denied everything. Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli government, scoffed: Israel, spying on the United States? Why, who ever heard of such a thing?! The US government, for its part, disdained all such reports as "an urban myth." The Israel lobby moved quickly to make sure the Cameron reports were thrown down the Memory Hole, and Cameron was accused of – you guessed it! – "anti-Semitism," on account of having spent time in the Middle East in his youth. 

Yet the story persisted. Die Zeit, the respected German weekly, ran a piece entitled "Next Door to Mohammed Atta," in which further evidence the Israelis had been tracking the hijackers quite closely was cited as coming from French intelligence sources. This was followed up by a story in Salon – hardly a bastion of anti-Semitic agitation – which gave a long and detailed account of the Israeli spying operation, as outlined by Cameron, and concluded that it was in large part meant as a diversionary tactic. The same author did a comprehensive follow-up in Counterpunch, after The Nation spiked it. Reputable newspapers like the Scottish Sunday Herald reported the known facts. 

Yet the 9/11 Commission did not so much as mention this aspect of the 9/11 story. Nor has Fox News ever followed up on Cameron’s reporting: they haven’t disavowed it, either. They, along with the rest of the "news" media in this country, simply pretend it never happened. When Arianna Huffington purged me from blogging on the Huffington Post, she cited my own reporting on this story as the reason: "Oh, come on, Dhaaa-link! You know dat’s anti-Semitic!" 

Really? Is Fox News anti-Semitic, too? Is Die Zeit? Salon? Le Monde? How about The Forward?

Of  course, Arianna is an airhead, but her instinct for self-preservation at all costs – yes, even at the cost of the truth – is indicative of what’s involved here. I was told, before I undertook to challenge the "official" 9/11 story, that I would pay for it by being cast out of the "mainstream" whilst being mercilessly smeared. In any event, since I was never all that interested in being considered "mainstream" – in part because I knew the whole concept of "mainstream" was very over – and because the prospect of being viciously attacked didn’t faze me in the least, I was undeterred. And I remain so to this day. 

What I want to know is this: does Fox News stand by Carl Cameron’s reporting on the question of Israeli foreknowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks? Yes – or no? If so, then what is their loudest mouth – I refer, of course, to Glenn Beck – doing smearing someone as a "Truther" who is asking the same sort of questions asked by Fox News reporter Cameron? If Van Jones must go, because he’s supposedly a "Truther," then Cameron must go, too.

No, I don’t expect an answer to my question any time soon – or, indeed, any time at all. I just want my readers to contemplate the implications of that, and what it says about the veracity of the "official" 9/11 narrative.

[Sep 11, 2009] Fifty questions on 9/11 By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE
Fifty questions on 9/11
By Pepe Escobar

It's September 11 all over again - eight years on. The George W Bush administration is out. The "global war on terror" is still on, renamed "overseas contingency operations" by the Barack Obama administration. Obama's "new strategy" - a war escalation - is in play in AfPak. Osama bin Laden may be dead or not. "Al-Qaeda" remains a catch-all ghost entity. September 11 - the neo-cons' "new Pearl Harbor" - remains the darkest jigsaw puzzle of the young 21st century.

It's useless to expect US corporate media and the ruling elites' political operatives to call for a true, in-depth investigation into the attacks on the US on September 11, 2001. Whitewash has been the norm. But even establishment highlight Dr Zbig "Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski, a former national security advisor, has admitted to the US Senate that the post-9/11 "war on terror" is a "mythical historical narrative".

The following questions, some multi-part - and most totally ignored by the 9/11 Commission - are just the tip of the immense 9/11 iceberg. A hat tip goes to the indefatigable work of 911truth.org; whatreallyhappened.com; architects and engineers for 9/11 truth; the Italian documentary Zero: an investigation into 9/11; and Asia Times Online readers' e-mails.

None of these questions has been convincingly answered - according to the official narrative. It's up to US civil society to keep up the pressure. Eight years after the fact, one fundamental conclusion is imperative. The official narrative edifice of 9/11 is simply not acceptable.

Fifty questions
1) How come dead or not dead Osama bin Laden has not been formally indicted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as responsible for 9/11? Is it because the US government - as acknowledged by the FBI itself - has not produced a single conclusive piece of evidence?

2) How could all the alleged 19 razor-blade box cutter-equipped Muslim perpetrators have been identified in less than 72 hours - without even a crime scene investigation?

3) How come none of the 19's names appeared on the passenger lists released the same day by both United Airlines and American Airlines?

4) How come eight names on the "original" FBI list happened to be found alive and living in different countries?

5) Why would pious jihadi Mohammed Atta leave a how-to-fly video manual, a uniform and his last will inside his bag knowing he was on a suicide mission?

6) Why did Mohammed Atta study flight simulation at Opa Locka, a hub of no less than six US Navy training bases?

7) How could Mohammed Atta's passport have been magically found buried among the Word Trade Center (WTC)'s debris when not a single flight recorder was found?

8) Who is in the possession of the "disappeared" eight indestructible black boxes on those four flights?

9) Considering multiple international red alerts about a possible terrorist attack inside the US - including former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's infamous August 6, 2001, memo - how come four hijacked planes deviating from their computerized flight paths and disappearing from radar are allowed to fly around US airspace for more than an hour and a half - not to mention disabling all the elaborate Pentagon's defense systems in the process?

10) Why the secretary of the US Air Force James Roche did not try to intercept both planes hitting the WTC (only seven minutes away from McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey) as well as the Pentagon (only 10 minutes away from McGuire)? Roche had no less than 75 minutes to respond to the plane hitting the Pentagon.
11) Why did George W Bush continue to recite "My Pet Goat" in his Florida school and was not instantly absconded by the secret service?

12) How could Bush have seen the first plane crashing on WTC live - as he admitted? Did he have previous knowledge - or is he psychic?

13) Bush said that he and Andrew Card initially thought the first hit on the WTC was an accident with a small plane. How is that possible when the FAA as well as NORAD already knew this was about a hijacked plane?

14) What are the odds of transponders in four different planes be turned off almost simultaneously, in the same geographical area, very close to the nation's seat of power in Washington, and no one scrambles to contact the Pentagon or the media?

15) Could defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld explain why initial media reports said that there were no fighter jets available at Andrews Air Force Base and then change the reports that there were, but not on high alert?

16) Why was the DC Air National Guard in Washington AWOL on 9/11?

17) Why did combat jet fighters of the 305th Air Wing, McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey not intercept the second hijacked plane hitting the WTC, when they could have done it within seven minutes?

18) Why did none of the combat jet fighters of the 459th Aircraft Squadron at Andrews Air Force Base intercept the plane that hit the Pentagon, only 16 kilometers away? And since we're at it, why the Pentagon did not release the full video of the hit?

19) A number of very experienced airline pilots - including US ally Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a former fighter jet pilot - revealed that, well, only crack pilots could have performed such complex maneuvers on the hijacked jets, while others insisted they could only have been accomplished by remote control. Is it remotely believable that the hijackers were up to the task?

20) How come a substantial number of witnesses did swear seeing and hearing multiple explosions in both towers of the WTC?

21) How come a substantial number of reputed architects and engineers are adamant that the official narrative simply does not explain the largest structural collapse in recorded history (the Twin Towers) as well as the collapse of WTC building 7, which was not even hit by a jet?

22) According to Frank de Martini, WTC's construction manager, "We designed the building to resist the impact of one or more jetliners." The second plane nearly missed tower 1; most of the fuel burned in an explosion outside the tower. Yet this tower collapsed first, long before tower 2 that was "perforated" by the first hit. Jet fuel burned up fast - and by far did not reach the 2000-degree heat necessary to hurt the six tubular steel columns in the center of the tower - designed specifically to keep the towers from collapsing even if hit by a Boeing 707. A Boeing 707 used to carry more fuel than the Boeing 757 and Boeing 767 that actually hit the towers.

23) Why did Mayor Rudolph Giuliani instantly authorized the shipment of WTC rubble to China and India for recycling?

24) Why was metallic debris found no less than 13 kilometers from the crash site of the plane that went down in Pennsylvania? Was the plane in fact shot down - under vice president Dick Cheney's orders?

25) The Pipelineistan question. What did US ambassador Wendy Chamberlain talk about over the phone on October 10, 2001, with the oil minister of Pakistan? Was it to tell him that the 1990s-planned Unocal gas pipeline project, TAP (Turkmenistan/Afghanistan/ Pakistan), abandoned because of Taliban demands on transit fees, was now back in business? (Two months later, an agreement to build the pipeline was signed between the leaders of the three countries).

26) What is former Unocal lobbyist and former Bush pet Afghan Zalmay Khalilzad up to in Afghanistan?

27) How come former Pakistani foreign minister Niaz Niak said in mid-July 2001 that the US had already decided to strike against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban by October? The topic was discussed secretly at the July Group of Eight summit in Genoa, Italy, according to Pakistani diplomats.

28) How come US ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine told FBI agent John O'Neill in July 2001 to stop investigating al-Qaeda's financial operations - with O'Neill instantly moved to a security job at the WTC, where he died on 9/11?

29) Considering the very intimate relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and the ISI and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is Bin Laden alive, dead or still a valuable asset of the ISI, the CIA or both?

30) Was Bin Laden admitted at the American hospital in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates on July 4, 2001, after flying from Quetta, Pakistan, and staying for treatment until July 11?

31) Did the Bin Laden group build the caves of Tora Bora in close cooperation with the CIA during the 1980s' anti-Soviet jihad?

32) How come General Tommy Franks knew for sure that Bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora in late November 2001?

33) Why did president Bill Clinton abort a hit on Bin Laden in October 1999? Why did then-Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf abort a covert ops in the same date? And why did Musharraf do the same thing again in August 2001?

34) Why did George W Bush dissolve the Bin Laden Task Force nine months before 9/11?

35) How come the (fake) Bin Laden home video - in which he "confesses" to being the perpetrator of 9/11 - released by the US on December 13, 2001, was found only two weeks after it was produced (on November 9); was it really found in Jalalabad (considering Northern Alliance and US troops had not even arrived there at the time); by whom; and how come the Pentagon was forced to release a new translation after the first (botched) one?

36) Why was ISI chief Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmad abruptly "retired" on October 8, 2001, the day the US started bombing Afghanistan?

37) What was Ahmad up to in Washington exactly on the week of 9/11 (he arrived on September 4)? On the morning of 9/11, Ahmad was having breakfast on Capitol Hill with Bob Graham and Porter Goss, both later part of the 9/11 Commission, which simply refused to investigate two of its members. Ahmad had breakfast with Richard Armitage of the State Department on September 12 and 13 (when Pakistan negotiated its "cooperation" with the "war on terror") and met all the CIA and Pentagon top brass. On September 13, Musharraf announced he would send Ahmad to Afghanistan to demand to the Taliban the extradition of Bin Laden.
38) Who inside the ISI transferred US$100,000 to Mohammed Atta in the summer of 2001 - under orders of Ahmad himself, as Indian intelligence insists? Was it really ISI asset Omar Sheikh, Bin Laden's information technology specialist who later organized the slaying of American journalist Daniel Pearl in Karachi? So was the ISI directly linked to 9/11?

39) Did the FBI investigate the two shady characters who met Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi in Harry's Bar at the Helmsley Hotel in New York City on September 8, 2001?

40) What did director of Asian affairs at the State Department Christina Rocca and the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan Abdul Salam Zaeef discuss in their meeting in Islamabad in August 2001?

41) Did Washington know in advance that an "al-Qaeda" connection would kill Afghan nationalist commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, aka "The Lion of the Panjshir", only two days before 9/11? Massoud was fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda - helped by Russia and Iran. According to the Northern Alliance, Massoud was killed by an ISI-Taliban-al Qaeda axis. If still alive, he would never have allowed the US to rig a loya jirga (grand council) in Afghanistan and install a puppet, former CIA asset Hamid Karzai, as leader of the country.

42) Why did it take no less than four months before the name of Ramzi Binalshibh surfaced in the 9/11 context, considering the Yemeni was a roommate of Mohammed Atta in his apartment cell in Hamburg?

43) Is pathetic shoe-bomber Richard Reid an ISI asset?

44) Did then-Russian president Vladimir Putin and Russian intelligence tell the CIA in 2001 that 25 terrorist pilots had been training for suicide missions?

45) When did the head of German intelligence, August Hanning, tell the CIA that terrorists were "planning to hijack commercial aircraft?"

46) When did Egyptian President Mubarak tell the CIA about an attack on the US with an "airplane stuffed with explosives?"

47) When did Israel's Mossad director Efraim Halevy tell the CIA about a possible attack on the US by "200 terrorists?"

48) Were the Taliban aware of the warning by a Bush administration official as early as February 2001 - "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs?"

49) Has Northrop-Grumman used Global Hawk technology - which allows to remotely control unmanned planes - in the war in Afghanistan since October 2001? Did it install Global Hawk in a commercial plane? Is Global Hawk available at all for commercial planes?

50) Would Cheney stand up and volunteer the detailed timeline of what he was really up to during the whole day on 9/11?

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Holiday Special: Something That Changed My Perspective (#2)

"the engineering of consent."

naked capitalism

Yesterday, I took advantage of this (hopefully) quiet week to share some things I have come across that affected how I view the world.

I can't recommend strongly enough that you view the four-part 2002 BBC documentary, The Century of the Self. Creator Adam Curtis said, "This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in an age of mass democracy." It focuses on how Freud's ideas were used by business and government, far more deliberately and extensively than one might imagine, during the 20th century to achieve what Curtis calls "the engineering of consent." This term was first used by Edward Bernays, the father of the public relations industry and nephew of Sigmund Freud. In Bernay's words:

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society,...Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. . . .

In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons . . . who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

This series describes how this "invisible government" came into being and operates.

Yesterday, we encouraged readers to watch the first segment, "Happiness Machines." Part 2 is "The Engineering of Consent." I encourage you to watch a few minutes here, and then go over to Google Video, since you will see it in a larger scale format there.



Click here to view it at Google Video.

LarryInCincy:

Wow!

This documentary was an eye opener. I can't recommend it enough either.

Of particular interest to me was how business got out of the business of supplying goods and services people needed, which was limited, and started providing lifestyle/identity stuff to people's psyches which was unlimited. No more boom and bust cycle based on over production.

Unfortunately, we forgot that, although the psyche is unlimited in its desires, the planet is limited in its resources.

foesskewered:

Whoa, blast from the past, the last time I heard theories like that was at a social sciences fac dinner and a anti-globalization march pamphlet, and they called those people conspiracy theorist nuts. The "they" were people skeptical of big government. But frankly, it's very British university fare, the politics students , depending on their preferences tend to think of those who believe in such theories as quirks, of course, some of these quirks turned into spin doctors, irony in caps

[Feb 28, 2009] Does the Media Deserve Liberal Defenders?

Economist's View

Should Democrats "ratchet down their hostility to newspapers and begin crusading on behalf of these imperiled organizations"?:

MSM, RIP, The Editors, The New Republic: ...Thirty-six percent of Americans now say that the press "hurts" democracy. Many others wouldn't express their feelings in ... such ... terms but share the basic disrespectful sentiment. Put another way, the crisis in journalism is even deeper than the crisis in its business model. It is suffering a crisis of legitimacy.

We all know the long list of scandals that has bloodied the profession--from Jayson Blair to Judith Miller to Dan Rather. But to focus only on these wrecks both misses the point and blames the victim. Just as the press has been slammed by the tides of technology, it has been hit hard by the political culture. The master narratives of both the right and the left have come to include the same villain: the hypocritical, biased elite media. And their combined grouching has helped foment the anti-media backlash.

On the right, the history of press-bashing is venerable... But during the Bush years, and thanks to Fox News, the critique of the liberal media was canonized...

A mirror version of this ... emerged on the left. In this telling, it was the timid, lazy press corps that failed to rigorously challenge the president's core (mendacious) claims about his tax cuts and rationale for heading to war. Very valid criticisms. But these specific objections morphed into populist broadsides against what the left came to describe as "the mainstream media"--avatars of establishmentarian groupthink who bend to the latest conventional wisdom emerging from D.C. cocktail parties and neurotically fret that they might be just as biased as their conservative critics allege. On The Huffington Post and its ilk, you would find rants about how "Beltway media really makes no effort to do anything other than parrot totally out-of-touch conventional wisdom--no matter how inane, stupid and ridiculous it is."

This rhetoric creates a poisonous atmosphere. By assaulting the credibility of the press, it destroys its authority in the culture, giving cover to politicians who would rather avoid dealing with reporters in the first place. ... When the administration needed to make its case, it took to the local press or Fox News, where it had no fear of probing questions.

At times, Obama has hinted that he will borrow from the Bush playbook and deal with the press only as he pleases, using new technology to vault over the old arbiters. Fortunately, that hasn't been his methodology in recent weeks... This is fortunate, because Obama is presiding over a turning-point moment in media history.

Obama can help set a tone for liberals, convincing them to ratchet down their hostility to newspapers and begin crusading on behalf of these imperiled organizations. The media deserves liberal critics, who hold it accountable. But it also deserves liberal defenders because a press working toward the ideal of objectivity is often the only means of blunting government or business run amok... Even the press's fiercest critics have been forced to acknowledge and fear its findings--an authority that will never exist in a world consisting entirely of partisan outlets. ...

Many venerable newspapers and magazines will close in the coming weeks and months; the ones that remain will be attenuated. But the old ideals embodied in these institutions must not be permitted to join the carnage.

When the press does its job well, it deserves defenders, and when it does a lousy job, it deserves being taken to task. The complaint seems to be that the criticism is without foundation, and there's some of that, but the fundamental problem is not, in my view, the people doing the criticizing, it's the media companies themselves. The argument also seems to treat "media" as something other than Fox News. I agree that the term journalism conjures up another image, as it should, but presently Fox News isn't clearly separate from other media outlets, far from it, and the commingling of all of these sources of information in the minds of the public is part of the problem. If journalists in the mainstream media want respect, they need to differentiate themselves from the "partisan outlets," including calling foul loudly and in no uncertain terms when Fox or whomever crosses the line, and they also need to do a better job themselves of establishing and maintaining their credibility through solid reporting.

You Call That Fact-Checking The Loom Discover Magazine

While recovering from an extracted wisdom tooth this morning, I cheered up when I saw that Talking Points Memo and other blogs have picked up my grousing about George Will’s error-laden global warming column in the Washington Post. When I first became aware of Will’s column on Monday, it seemed to me the perfect example of the general problem with treating op-ed pages as “opinion.” That is, if by opinion, you mean that someone doesn’t have to adhere to the facts. I could state that the Earth is 6000 years old, and no one would dare correct me, because it’s just my opinion. (I guess that’s the rationale that led Forbes and US News to run pieces by young-Earth creationists as “commentary” a couple weeks ago in “honor” of Darwin’s birthday. [Okay. No more air quotes. Promise.])

Now we learn via Andrew Alexander, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, that the editorial page has a whole team of fact-checkers. Or at least there are personal assistants to George Will, a couple syndication editors, and Post copy editors who have been identified as fact-checkers. Somehow, this army all decided that Will’s piece was just dandy. Even weirder was the post-modern refusal to run a correction from Alan Shearer, the Washington Post Writers Group editorial director: “We have plenty of references that support what George wrote, and we have others that dispute that. So we didn’t have enough to send in a correction.”

It seems as if the Washington Post just doesn’t think this is important. Via Jay Rosen I learned that Alexander’s inaugural ombudsman column today has nary a mention of the affair–even though Alexander himself made inquiries. Maybe Alexander just wanted to say “Hello, World,” in his first piece, without diving straight into any particular complaints. That’s fine. Let’s see what he writes about once the niceties are out of the way. (He invites email: ombudsman@washpost.com )

My own opinion is that this was a serious screw-up, but not an easy one to solve in any systemic way. In an ideal world, editorial pages would employ full-time fact-checkers who felt no fear in pointing out small and large errors of fact. Only after their objections had been satisfied would a column see the light of day. That’s what happens to articles at some magazines today.

In the real world, though, a lot of magazines don’t have fact-checkers on staff, and they expect writers to do the fact-checking themselves. It’s particularly tough for newspapers, which churn out so many stories a day. To fact-check those stories well, they’d have to hire back a fair amount of the people they’ve laid off in recent years. I assume the same probably goes for editorial pages, although I can’t say for sure, never having dealt with them myself.

Still, it remains seriously weird for a national newspaper to run a piece that they claim has been thoroughly fact-checked, which has since been showed to be plainly flawed. It’s also weird for it to then refuse to run a correction based on a bogus sense of balance about the evidence of how much ice there is in the world and what that means for climate change.

A lot of people have left comments here complaining about George Will. And others have then accused them (and me) of being part of a left-wing conspiracy, attacking Will while letting the inaccuracies of others slide by. For me this is not really about Will. It’s about how newspapers and magazines succeed or fail to convey science as accurately as possible. And this case is a textbook example of failure. I hope something is learned from it.

[Update, 2/22: I’ve added a new post addressing some confusion over some late-breaking news about the satellites that measure ice. And along the way, we are reminded of just how weak the multi-layered fact-checking at the Washington Post editorial page is.]

February 21st, 2009 3:50 PM by Carl Zimmer in Global Warming, Meta

5 Responses to “You Call That Fact-Checking?”

1. Paul Riddell Says:

   February 21, 2009

   Having a bit of a journalism background, it’s easy to apply Riddell’s Law (”Any sufficiently developed incompetence is indistinguishable from conspiracy”) to understand why the factcheckers didn’t call Will on his gibberish. Even before the big newspaper layoffs, most factcheckers were and are interns or part-time wage slaves hopeful that they’d be hired if they just shut up, take the abuse, and continue to kiss editorial butt. The last thing you want to do, in that situation, is point out that one of the paper’s star columnists is full of garbage, especially if you can point out line and verse.

   Speaking as someone who faced a literal temper tantrum when an assistant editor discovered that I was getting more and better reviews of my articles than he was for his, I can tell you that nothing combines an ego big enough to produce tides and a skin too thin to be used for condoms than a newspaper columnist. This is especially true when the critic is a part-time employee within the columnist’s own organization, the columnist has an overarching sense of his own importance, and when the paper’s editors are too cowardly, lazy, or arrogant to tell their drinking buddy to rewrite or kill the column. That’s why nobody was willing to face Will’s wrath.

Paul Krugman, New York Times Columnist and Author of The Great Unraveling Losing Our Way in the New Century - A BuzzFlash Interview

Paul Krugman, New York Times Columnist and Author of "The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century"

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Paul Krugman to BuzzFlash.com: "Well, a couple of things. The first is that a good part of the media are essentially part of the machine. If you work for any Murdoch publication or network, or if you work for the Rev. Moon's empire, you're really not a journalist in the way that we used to think. You're basically just part of a propaganda machine. And that's a pretty large segment of the media.

As for the rest, certainly being critical at the level I've been critical –- basically saying that these guys are lying, even if it's staring you in the face –- is a very unpleasant experience. You get a lot of heat from people who should be on your side, because they accuse you of being shrill, which is everybody's favorite word for me. And you become a personal target. It can be quite frightening. I've seen cases where a journalist starts to say something less than reverential about Bush, and then catches himself or herself, and says something like, "Oh, I better not say that, I'll get 'mailed.'" And what they mean by "mail" is hate mail, and it also means that somebody is going to try to see if there's anything in your personal history that can be used to smear you.

It's like shock therapy, aversion therapy. If you touch these things, you yourself are going to get an unpleasant, painful electric shock. And most people in the media just back off as a result."

This week an interesting story appeared in the Washington Post – buried on page 16, of course, lest anyone think it was of the slightest importance. It revealed that documentary proof has now emerged confirming the fact that in the spring of 2003, the Bush Regime – flush with its illusory "victory" in Iraq – spurned a wide-ranging peace feeler from Iran which offered "full cooperation" on every issue that the Bushists claim to be concerned about in regard to Tehran: "nuclear programs, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups." The offer was made through the Swiss Embassy....In other words, everything that George W. Bush says he wants from the Iranians now, he could have had for the asking – three years ago. What then can we conclude from the rejection of this extraordinary initiative? The answer is obvious: that the Bush Faction is not really interested in curbing nuclear proliferation or defusing the powder keg of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the regional and global terror that it spawns. ....

Despite it Being the Worst Military Blunder in U.S History, the GOP Sees Iraq War as Campaign Opportunity. Am I Missing Something?, Andy Ostroy

So what gives with the Repugs? They are now embracing the war whole-hog. What do they know about it, or its political currency, that's getting them excited about November? The answer is simple: as it was in 2004, it's all about lies, deception and fear-mongering. A masterful campaign to scare the bejesus out of Americans. It's Karl Rove's game plan, and it worked like a charm before. The question is, will it work again? The Repugs are banking heavily on it. Listen to the rhetoric; to the character assassinations. Close your eyes and it's '04 all over again. Witness the Swift-boating attacks on Kerry and Rep. John Murtha (PA), branded as "cut and run" cowards. Listen as VP Dick Chickenhawk warns that the Kerry/Murtha withdrawal plans tell the world that "Americans don't have the stomach for this fight" (a subject Mr. Five Deferments knows a lot about personally). Listen to the misuse and abuse of the word "terrorist." Throughout American military history, we've fought many types of enemies in battle: armies, rebels, guerrillas, insurgents. But since 9/11, and as a direct result of Bush's unjust invasion of Iraq, every enemy's a "terrorist" now. And this morphing process serves one purpose: to use 9/11 as a deceptive basis for, and justification of, the Iraq invasion. "Fight 'em over there so we don't have to over here," is the common Bushevik refrain. It's been over three years since the invasion, and we all now know that (a) there was no WMD in Iraq, (b) there was no direct connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, and (c) Iraq had zero to do with 9/11. Yet it's astounding that the Repugs are back morphing the two, however overtly and/or subtly, in their quest to scare Americans into voting once again for their failed leadership.....

Fracturing the Bush Base: A Compassionate Approach, Bernard Weiner

My understanding of Buddhist practice -- big on compassion and understanding, small on coercion and retribution -- kicked in after watching Frontline's "The Dark Side" last week, the powerful 90-minute documentary examination of how the CheneyBush White House manipulated the country into war with Iraq. I wondered whether a shift in thinking about Bush and Cheney and Rumseld and the rest of the crew would alter the way I viewed them and the war. (By the way, if you missed the show -- the first such full-length documentary on a major network laying out the lies and deceptions -- it can now be seen online. Here's what I mean: Suppose one viewed the members of Bush&Co. as sincere idealists. They had been warned by the outgoing Clinton administration that al-Qaida was extremely dangerous, but it wasn't until the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that they woke up and, out of love of country, decided to do something about it. (Even if you don't think this scenario accords with the facts, I beg you to stick with me here, and see where this line of argument is going.).... Crocodile Tears: U.S. and Human Rights, William Fisher
If you're into black humor, you might find it amusing that two of the countries with some of the world's worst human rights records are making international propaganda hay out of America's performance in prisoner abuse and civil liberties. For example, Saudi Arabia's Arab News, the largest English language newspaper in the Middle East, weighed in on the arrest of the seven Miami men accused of conspiring to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. In an editorial, the newspaper uses the arrests to observe that, post 9/11, 'Many Americans may overlook the increasingly draconian security measures being applied in their own backyard as part of the war against terrorism.' The paper asks: 'Will history record that Osama Bin Laden succeeded after all against his real enemies of liberty and freedom?'......

[Jun 25, 2006]Murtha says U.S. poses top threat to world peace South Florida Sun-Sentinel Tucson, Arizona | Published: 06.25.2006

MIAMI — American presence in Iraq is more dangerous to world peace than nuclear threats from North Korea or Iran, Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said to an audience of more than 200 in North Miami Saturday afternoon.

Murtha was the guest speaker at a town hall meeting organized by Rep. Kendrick B. Meek, D-Miami, at Florida International University's Biscayne Bay Campus. Meek's mother, former Rep. Carrie Meek, D-Miami, was also on the panel.

War veterans, local mayors, university students and faculty were in the Mary Ann Wolfe Theatre to listen to the three panelists discuss the war in Iraq for an hour.

A former Marine and a prominent critic of the Bush administration's policies in Iraq, Murtha reiterated his views that the war cannot be won militarily and needs political solutions. He said the more than 100,000 troops in Iraq should be pulled out immediately, and deployed to peripheral countries like Kuwait.

"We do not want permanent bases in Iraq," Murtha told the audience. "We want as many Americans out of there as possible."

Murtha also has publicly said that the shooting of 24 Iraqis in November at Haditha, a city in the Anbar province of western Iraq that has been plagued by insurgents, was wrongfully covered up.

The killings, which sparked an investigation into the deadly encounter and another into whether they were the subject of a cover-up, could undermine U.S. efforts in Iraq more than the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib in 2004, Murtha said.

"(The United States) became the target when Abu Ghraib came along," Murtha said.

[Apr 26, 2006] Charley Reese Epitaph For The War Dead

A long time ago, Ezra Pound wrote an epitaph for the war dead of the 20th century, and now it applies equally well to the war dead of the 21st.

They "walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men's lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie, home to many deceits, home to old lies and new infamy, usury age-old and age-thick and liars in public places. ... There died a myriad, and of the best, among them, for an old bitch gone in the teeth, for a botched civilization."

That's what all the young men and now women are dying for - lies and a botched civilization. They are not dying for freedom or to defend their homes and loved ones. They are dying so corporations can make big profits, so evil old men who presume to re-arrange the world to suit their notions can test their theories. They are dying for money, oil and ego, and none of it is worth the life of single boy or girl.

Ernest Hemingway said it best when he said, "War itself is a crime against humanity." The people who deserve to be tried as war criminals are the politicians on both sides who start the wars. To think of the millions of young people, all the joys of life still ahead of them, who have died for scabrous ideologies, political stupidity and the greed of people far from the sound of the guns should turn everyone into an isolationist.

But lies are powerful, and people are easy to manipulate. One of the Nazis said all you have to do is have an enemy at the gate and then suggest that anyone who opposes you is unpatriotic. That is precisely the game plan the Bush administration has employed.

What's actually unpatriotic is to support wars started by crooks and liars for reasons they hide from the public. What's unpatriotic is for old men who won't be within 7,000 miles of the sight of blood to be cheerleaders for the war du jour. What's unpatriotic is for the press to act as a conduit for propaganda rather than independently developing information the people need to know.

It's painful to acknowledge that these young people, so idealistic, were and are being lied to so that they die not for their ideals, but for the sordid schemes of lying politicians, corporations and special-interest groups. No wonder the Bush administration doesn't want photographs of the coffins and tries to blame the press for bad news even though, God knows, the American media rub every story with Clorox and censor the photographs like they were some Puritan in pursuit of sin. No wonder the Bush administration has a murderous hatred for Al-Jazeera, the Arab television station that shows the reality of the war with all its stink, filth and blood.

American society today is a house of lies. People are continuously being lied to for commercial, political and ideological reasons. They are lied to about the environment, the war, foreign policy, the economy, agriculture and public health. You name it, and the Establishment has a set of lies all ready to dupe the public into supporting its selfish aims.

I advise every parent to actively discourage his or her children from joining the military until we have cleaned up the political mess in Washington. Idealistic young men and women should not be sent to do the work of mercenaries.

For the kind of murder Mr. Bush wants to commit, he should form an American version of the French Foreign Legion and pay the market price for mercenaries. There are enough heartless psychopaths in the world to do that kind of work without killing, maiming and scarring the souls of America's best young people.

If you want to support the troops, put pressure on the spineless, lying politicians to bring them home. Don't worry about Iraq going to hell. It's already there...

[May 20, 2006]  Charley Reese 'What people believe'

Charley Reese, Antiwar.com

How do you persuade a man who has a wife and children and who works hard but can barely make ends meet to take a pay cut and go do something that has a high probability of getting him killed or seriously injured?

Clearly, it is not in a man's self-interest to go to a foreign country and fight in a war, the outcome of which won't affect him or his family. So how do you persuade him to do it?

The answer lies in the nature of the human being. We are mind-directed creatures. We act on the basis of our beliefs. Therefore, if you can control what people believe, you can control what they do. That's the whole purpose of advertising, for example - to instill in people's minds the belief that a product or service will be beneficial to them.

Persuading people to go to war is much more complicated and involves identity, which is constructed of beliefs. When we are born, we don't know who we are or where we are. We only know we've just been pushed out of the warm womb into the drafty world of giants who can pick us up by our feet and whack our backsides. We protest the only way we can - by yelling.

The first beliefs that will come to constitute our identity come from parents or caregivers. Any psychiatrist can tell you how important these beliefs are and how difficult they are to shed. Then we begin to add more from our peers, from the culture and from education. So, we learn we are Americans, and just what are Americans? Well, we are told about that largely through history, through stories told by our own family and stories we read or see in the movies.

And once we identify ourselves as Americans, then we will act as we believe Americans, as we have defined them, ought to act. It was not in my self-interest to go into the Army. I had a good job. I had already decided against the military as a career. But, as an American, I believed it was my duty, so I went, and if the Army had said to go to Vietnam, I would have gone without question. My identity as an American was based on my beliefs, and part of those beliefs was that every American had a duty to take his turn on watch.

Millions of men have gone to war because, as Americans or British or French or Germans or Russians or Japanese, they believed it was their duty. The danger lies in the fact that unscrupulous men, through misrepresentation and propaganda, can motivate people to go to war even though it is not in their country's interest, much less their own. Unless there is an invader threatening one's home and hearth, it is never in the interest of an individual to go war - unless he decides to be a mercenary.

It is an evil paradox that men with the lowest motives can launch wars by appealing to the highest ideals of better men.

The millions killed in all the wars were nobodies as far as the leaders who sent them into war were concerned. They were cannon fodder. They all shared in common the fact that their political leaders were willing to sacrifice them for greed or ego. For all practical purposes, all of the dead in wars are unknown soldiers in the war leaders' eyes. The dead are known only to the people who loved them.

The trick is to remember to make the distinction between America in the abstract and America in reality. The America in the abstract is made up of all our experiences, memories, stories, legends and myths. The America in reality consists of what exists right at this moment.

And what exists right at this moment is a corrupt federal government with a foolish man in the White House. What exists at this moment is a military-industrial complex with a vested interest in war and conflict. What exists at this moment are unnecessary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. What exists at this moment is a government solicitous of corporate welfare, but one that doesn't give a hoot about the individual American.

Rudyard Kipling said it so well when in a poem he wrote: "If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied." Be alert when you hear politicians talk about abstractions like patriotism, national security and international stability. They are trying to control you by controlling your mind.

Charley Reese has been a journalist for 49 years, reporting on everything from sports to politics. From 1969-71, he worked as a campaign staffer for gubernatorial, senatorial and congressional races in several states. He was an editor, assistant to the publisher, and columnist for the Orlando Sentinel from 1971 to 2001. He now writes a syndicated column three times a week for King Features, which is carried on Antiwar.com. Reese served two years active duty in the U.S. Army as a tank gunner.

Copyright 2006 Antiwar.com

Film warns of military-industrial complex

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- In his new documentary, 'Why We Fight,' director Eugene Jarecki examines the growth of the United States` military-industrial complex from after World War II up to today`s controversial war in Iraq.

'Back then, the reasons (for war) were clear -- fascism, genocide, oppression,' Jarecki, who also directed 2002`s 'The Trials of Henry Kissinger,' says on the movie`s Web site. 'Today, if you ask people why we are fighting in Iraq, I think the reasons are far less clear.'

The movie, the Grand Jury Prize winner at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, focuses on the topics of preemption, the industry of war and global economic colonialism by the United States. The documentary uses no real narrator; instead telling a story through interviews with bomber pilots, government employees, politicians and average American citizens in 30 states as it unveils a war-dependent U.S. culture.

The film opens with President Dwight D. Eisenhower`s 1961 farewell speech, in which he predicted the problems a permanently militarized United States would have.

'In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,' Eisenhower said in the speech, often championed by Jarecki throughout the film. 'The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.'

From there, Jarecki interviews the pilots who dropped the first bombs on Iraq in 2003, a Vietnamese war survivor turned tactical weapons expert and recounts the tale of Wilton Sekzer, a retired New York City policeman who lost his son in the Sept. 11, 2001 mega-terror attacks. After the attacks, Sekzer contacted the armed forces, and eventually got his son`s name on a bomb that later fell on Iraq.

After President George W. Bush confirmed that Iraq had played no part in the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, Sekzer felt exploited for his patriotism.

'Am I sorry I asked for my son`s name to be put on the bomb?' Sekzer muses. 'No, because I acted under the conditions at the time. Was it wrong? Yeah, it was wrong, but I didn`t know that.'

Rather than using the heavy-handed approach that another documentary film-maker Michael Moore took in 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' Jarecki stays behind-the-scenes throughout the movie, allowing his interviewees to do the talking. Though Jarecki maintains he interviewed a conservative majority, it would be a lie to say 'Why We Fight' doesn`t take a liberal slant. Despite the biased angle, conservative voices receive an opportunity to comment on the film`s issues, most notably military preemption.

'What`s the big fuss about preemption?' says former Defense Department official and neo-conservative Richard Perle. 'You`d shoot first if someone was planning to shoot you right?'

The movie separates itself from simple anti-Bush critiques by offering a broader cultural study, both historically and geographically. An especially powerful segment of the film shows a world map that is then chronologically peppered with U.S. military conflicts from World War II until the present.

The United States` support of and then subsequent hostility towards foreign nations is also a talking point, punctuated by the image of current Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam Hussein in 1983.

In contrast to the critiques against preemption and the United States` economic war machine is the story of George Solomon, a 23-year-old who signs up to be an army pilot after his mother dies. Solomon represents the thousands of people who turn to the military as the answer for their life`s complications.

'These three problems: my mother`s death, my financial hardship and my inability to complete my education,' Solomon says. 'All of these problems are gonna be solved by my enlistment in the military.'

If Eisenhower is the hero in 'Why We Fight,' the villain must be Vice President Dick Cheney, who is identified as a former weapons contractor and personifies the idea of war as a business. Cheney`s economic impact on the military is thoroughly criticized by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who is interrupted while panning Cheney on-camera by a phone call from the vice president himself.

While at times the movie seems to only raise more questions rather than answers, one strong message is for the United States to remember its political and military history. Scattering the film`s 98 minutes are quotes from Presidents George Washington and Eisenhower that warn of the dangers of a U.S. permanent military presence. Using techniques like this, Jarecki sends a clear message the United States must avoid becoming what author Gore Vidal calls the 'United States of Amnesia.'

totse.com The Media-Industrial Complex

The Media-Industrial Complex is a term I made up for what used to be called the Military-Industrial Complex.

Back when the cold war was in full swing, the military-industrial complex would propose multi-billion dollar "defense" projects to Congress, hoping that Congress would allocate billions of tax dollars to fund these projects.

Congressional members who voted for these projects received campaign funds from the military-industrial complex so they could get re-elected. The factories, military bases, and research institutions that these billions of dollars paid for ended up being located in the home districts of the same influential congressmen and senators who voted for the projects in the first place.

Any member of Congress who did not vote for these projects would be labeled "soft on communism" or a "pacifist" or a "traitor to the American Way Of Life". When the next election came around, people who voted against these projects would find that their opponents were suddenly much better funded than they'd been in the past.

Some of these projects were actually nd power gener profits. The senators and congressmen got re-election funds and managed to hold on to power for as long as they wished. The American people got a first-rate defense system, although they'd paid billions more for that defense than they probably needed to, and ended up putting their great-grandchildren into debt in the process.

In this post-cold war world, the military doesn't have the power it once did to create multi-million dollar projects that were easily sold to a willing Congress. We just don't have the same threats to the American Way of Life that we once did. However, the same defense contractor shareholders who siphoned off billions of tax dollars using the "defense" scam are still out there and they're still the same greedy bastards they always were. As the cold war wound its way down these people sold off their defense stocks and started buying media companies.

We no longer have real threats to the American Way of Life, but if the media tells you day after day of some new danger, real or imaginary, you can bet that Congress will be only too happy to allocate the funds to fight that danger. The cycle will continue, campaign funds will be given, and stockholders will get rich off of American taxpayer dollars. That's why a defense contractor like General Electric bought NBC, and another defense contractor named Westinghouse bought ABC. Those are the well-known cases, but they're just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

25 Rules of Disinformation: How to Fight Back	by VoxFux
People can be bought, threatened, or blackmailed into providing disinformation, so even "good guys" can be suspect in many cases.
Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks	by Richard Stallman
The Soviet Union treated it as very important. There this unauthorized copying and re-distribution was known as Samizdat and to stamp it out, they developed a series of methods: First, guards watching every piece of copying equipment to check what people were copying to prevent forbidden copying. Second, harsh punishments for anyone caught doing forbidden copying. Third, soliciting informers, asking everyone to rat on their neighbors and co-workers to the information police.
Corporate Influence on the Media and Perception of History	by Greg Wells
This is a short essay, in the form of a speech. I used it as an outline of sorts for a lecture. Focusing on the biased slant in news reporting placed by corporate interests, and the apparent lack of historical analysis of the assassination of Senator Huey Long, this short essay is pretty basic stuff, but interesting.
Freedom Or Copyright?	by Richard Stallman
Computers can be powerful tools of domination when a few people control what other people's computers do. The publishers realized that by forcing people to use specially designated software to read e-books, they can gain unprecedented power: they can compel readers to pay, and identify themselves, every time they read a book!
From Melbourne to Prague: the Struggle for a Deglobalized World	by Walden Bello
For years, we were told that globalization was benign, that it was a process that brought about the greatest good for the greatest number, that good citizenship lay in accepting the impersonal rule of the market and good governance meant governments getting out of the way of market forces and letting the most effective incarnation of market freedom, the transnational corporation, go about its task of bringing about the most efficient mix of capital, land, technology and labor.
Goverment Influence Of The Media
This Article purports to have copies of memos from the White House telling media stations what to say and not say.
Media Literacy: How the Media Constructs Reality	by Media Literacy Resource Guide
1. All media are CONSTRUCTIONS. 2. All media construct REALITY. 3. AUDIENCES negotiate meaning in media. 4. Media have COMMERCIAL implications. 5. Media contain IDEOLOGICAL and VALUE messages. 6. Media have SOCIAL and POLITICAL implications. 7. Media have UNIQUE AESTHETIC FORM that is closely related to CONTENT.
Overcoming the Trickster: Media Wars of the 21st Century	by Roger W. Wicke
To do this successfully in the realm of truth-finding, we must know the tactics and strategies of our opponents in the great media wars of the 20th and 21st centuries; then, we must change our own behaviors and strategies so that we are no longer susceptible to these techniques.
Propaganda in Theory and Practice
"If you give a man the correct information for seven years, he may believe the incorrect information on the first day of the eighth year when it is necessary, from your point of view, that he should do so. Your first job is to build the credibility and authenticity of your propaganda, and persuade the enemy to trust you although you are his enemy."
Senator Kerrey Speaks on Government/Media Complicity	by Joel Bleifuss and Senator Bob Kerrey
Government/Media complicity during the 1990 Gulf War.
Subliminal Ads on TV in the Bay Area!
Is this supposed to be some sort of joke, or a form of subliminal message? The message appears only for a fraction of a second, then disappears...
The CIA's Project MOCKINGBIRD: Ongoing Covert Control of the Media	by Alex Constantine
Who Controls the Media? Soulless corporations do, of course. Corporations with grinning, double-breasted executives, interlocking directorates, labor squabbles and flying capital. Dow. General Electric. Coca-Cola. Disney.
The Future of the DJ	by Andrew Octopus
As corporations coagulate into multimedia hegemonies and consolidate their grasp on airwaves of all sorts, the physical and digital spaces we control and use for audiovisual expression on the independent individual level become more critical, to the point of being crucial.
The Israeli Spy Ring Scandal	by whatreallyhappened
Prior to 9/11, the FBI had discovered the presence of a massive spy ring inside the United States run by the government of Israel. This seems a harsh gratitude from a nation which obtains 10% of its annual budget from the American taxpayer, $3+ billion a year. Over the years, American taxpayers have been required to send Israel more than four times what the US spent to go to the moon.
The Media Goes to War: How TV Sold The Panama Invasion	by Mark Cook and Jeff Cohen
Obviously there was a mix of opinion inside Panama, but it was virtually unreported on television, the dominant medium shaping US attitudes about the invasion. Panamanian opposition to the US was dismissed as nothing more than "thugs" who'd been given jobs by Noriega. It was hardly acknowledged that the high-visibility demonstration outside the Vatican Embassy the day of Noriega's surrender had been actively "encouraged" by the US.
The Peruvian Embassy Siege and the Media	by Andrew Flood
The action by the MRTA in seizing the Japanese in Lima, Peru in December and capturing a spectacular array of personnel from the Peruvian and international ruling class in doing so at first attracted considerable international media attention.
The Spectacular Achievements of Media Control	by Chuck Dodson
Basically this is a serious magnification of Noam Chomsky's 1991 "Media Control, The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda" speech about the war against Iraq and the broader issues behind it and leading up to it. With this paper, I compare Chomsky's insights into the culture that promotes and allows a continual *parade* of foreign enemies, and show how the same phenomenon happens at home with a *parade* of domestic enemies, especially focusing on the continual hype against persons called "pedophiles".
Twenty-Five Ways To Suppress Truth: The Rules of Disinformation	by H. Michael Sweeney
Manufacture a new truth. Create your own expert(s), group(s), author(s), leader(s) or influence existing ones willing to forge new ground via scientific, investigative, or social research or testimony which concludes favourably.
Video Game Violence vs. Societal Violence	by XiPPiLLi
On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold went to their high school, in Littleton, Colorado and killed 12 classmates and one teacher before turning their guns on themselves. The Columbine High incident raised a panic level already high in the United States, and, most would say, rightfully so. People realized then, if they hadn't already, that kids have access to guns and that the results can be grim. The Rocky Mountain News covered the incident in depth, reporting on August 22, 1999, "His [Eric Harris] nickname, Reb, was inspired by a character in one of his favorite computer games, Doom, where the goal is to score high body counts." The paper pointed out "one of the game's slogans: 'Doom -- where the sanest place is behind a trigger.'" It was widely publicized that police had found a videotape that showed either Harris or Klebold with a sawed-off shotgun on his lap that he called "Arlene"--a Doom reference.
What Good is Free Speech if No One Listens?	by Kurt Luedtke
I was for 15 years a journalist, a vocation in which you'd think you would learn a lot. I learned three things: The accused you've never met is more guilty than the one you've talked to. Truth and accuracy are not the same. Things are never, ever, as they appear to be.
Why Newspapers are Pro-government	by Vin Suprynowicz
Having worked in the newspaper business for 25 years, I'm often at pains to explain to folks that the pro-big-government slant of the news media (though very real) is not a "conspiracy," in the simplistic sense. That is to say, I've never known an editor to wear a hole in his carpet, pacing the floor as he waits for the phone call from the Tri-Lateral Commission (or whomever) to "instruct" him which stories to feature, and how to interpret them.
World Media Protest Day	by RecDude
The mission statement and date for the World Media Protest

Amazon.co.uk Between the Lies Rise of the Media-military-industrial Complex Books

Since WWII, the West has moved from being a society proudly ordered around the notion of a 'finest hour' to a climate of cynicism and social disengagement. Between the Lies argues this is part of a longer process of declining public morality, and that it is time for critical reassessment of what the West did actually achieve during the war and subsequently.

The book examines some of the key military campaigns of the 20th Century. It exposes the hidden dynamics that exist in wartime between secrecy, governance, public opinion and the media, and the replication in 'peacetime' of wartime methods of information management. It provides compelling evidence of the role of the media in the development of the modern military-industrial complex and its influence on public conceptions of 'national interest'.

Unless we can use our growing understanding of these processes to change direction, Western democracy faces further moral and political decline. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Not for the faint-hearted, January 11, 2005
  Reviewer:   William Steiner (South Africa) - See all my reviews  For more than 150 years there has curiously been only one notable, non-fiction book that convincingly (albeit incompletely) chronicles the history of human folly. That is Charles Mackay's classic work Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). Now, finally, a worthy successor has come along. It is Stan Winer's no less extraordinary but rather more contemporary Between the Lies. Sadly, however, and in contrast to McKay's work, Between the Lies is unlikely to find a wide, general readership. That is because Winer's book is not for the faint hearted, and as TS Eliot once observed, "Mankind cannot bear too much reality." But for the select few who are unaffected by such concerns, Between the Lies offers rare insights into modern military history, and it is essential reading for those interested in the frequently disastrous consequences of media hype and political hocus-pocus. Conspiracy theorists, however, may be in for a disappointment. This book is not about conspiracy theory but about conspiracy fact. Read it, and the world around will never again seem quite the same.

Robert Fisk 'Seymour Hersh versus the Bush administration (and the DC press corps)'

Hersh might have said that we'd also had a "collapse" of the media in the United States, a total disintegration of the Ed Murrow/Howard K Smith/ Daniel Elsworth/Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward school of journalism. The greying, bespectacled, obscenity-swearing Hersh is about all we have left to frighten the most powerful man in the world (save for the jibes of Maureen Dowd in The New York Times).

So it's good to know he's still doing some fighting, including other journalists on his target list. "I know some serious generals," he says. "I can't urge them to go public. They'd be attacked by Fox (TV), and the (New York) Times and The Washington Post would wring their hands. It's a mechanism. You don't get rewarded in the newsroom for being a malcontent." Journalists on the mainstream papers are largely middle-class college graduates--not reporters who came up the hard way like Hersh's street reporting in Chicago in his early days. They have largely no connection to the immigrants' society. "They don't know what it's like to be on social welfare. Their families weren't in Vietnam and their families are not in Iraq." The BBC, too, has "fallen off the way".

Conversation with John Kenneth Galbraith, p. 3 of 7

One gets the sense today that the liberals still have a fear of losing a domino on their watch. To quote from your autobiography, talking about President Kennedy and referring to the Bay of Pigs and the acceptance of neutral Laos, Kennedy said, "You have to realize that I can only afford so many defeats in one year." Electoral loss is a real fear for liberal democratic politicians when they confront the Third World, when they confront communism.

Oh no question about it, and I wouldn't, for a moment, be happy about it.

I knew the Far East probably somewhat better than my colleagues in the Kennedy administration, and I would never have supported the idea of a communist Indochina or a communist Vietnam. I don't think communism is relevant to that stage of economic development. But I was strongly persuaded that this was not something that was within the reach of our power, and that we could mire ourselves there in an impossible situation, because extending our information to that country was an impossible task. So my basic argument in those days was that Vietnam and Indochina must be returned to the obscurity on the world's scene for which God intended them. That they were not of great social, political, economic, or strategic importance to the United States. In taking that position, I was somewhat successful in avoiding the label of being pro-communist. I always argued that it takes a very precise Washington observer to tell the difference between a communist jungle and a capitalist jungle -- both are irrelevant to the jungles of Vietnam.

[May 14, 2006] Staff spy scandal at German magazine - World - smh.com.au

BERLIN: Germany's prestigious news magazine Der Spiegel, famed throughout decades for rooting out corruption and the vagaries of errant politicians, admitted today some of its staff had been working for the government intelligence service.

In an article in the next edition on Monday, released in advance, the celebrated weekly - considered a watchdog of press and democratic freedoms in post-war Germany - said one staff member in a regional bureau had been working for the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) as recently as last northern autumn.

Another filing from war zones around the world had likewise been providing information to the BND on a colleague working for Focus, a rival weekly German news magazine.

The BND, Germany's overseas intelligence-gathering agency, has in effect admitted to committing "mistakes", thereby appearing to confirm indirectly that it had been spying on German journalists.

The revelations appeared yesterday in the quality Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. Quoting from Spiegel's own article, it said the BND had kept several journalists under surveillance for some years in order to find out the source of leaks from the BND to the press.

Former BND chief Volker Foertsch has also admitted that journalists had sometimes been used as informers.

"The aim of the contacts was to prevent publication of prejudicial articles and find out where the journalists were getting their information from inside the BND," he was quoted by another newspaper, the Berliner Zeitung, as saying.

Der Spiegel, founded in 1947, became widely read as West Germany developed post-war democratic institutions.

It achieved its greatest moment of fame in 1962 when its publisher Rudolf Augstein and top editorial staff were temporarily taken into police custody on suspicion of treason after the magazine published damaging details of results of a NATO military exercise.

All were later released without charge and Der Spiegel's reputation was secured as a pillar of press freedom in a post-war society ultra-sensitive about the probity of political institutions.

[Apr 29, 2006] TomDispatch - Tomgram Judith Coburn, Caring for Veterans on the Cheap

Tomgram: Judith Coburn, Caring for Veterans on the Cheap

Can anyone be surprised any longer when FEMA reneges on its promise of a year's free housing to Hurricane Katrina evacuees? Or that, in once can-do America, the devastated southeastern coast from which those residents fled in such confusion remains almost singularly unreconstructed as the next hurricane season approaches? Or that the only ones likely to receive relief at the gas pump this summer are the oil companies? Or that the Bush administration is incapable of running a new Medicare drug program as anything other than an experience in chaos? Or that so many functions that once made civil government seem in any way civil are simply disappearing and others are being rebuilt on a military model? Typically, a Senate report on dismantling FEMA suggests replacing it with

"a new National Preparedness and Response Authority whose head would... serve as the president's top adviser for national emergency management, akin to the military role served by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It would reunify disaster preparedness and response activities that [Department of Homeland Security head Michael] Chertoff decoupled, and restore grant-making authority taken away by Congress in redefining a stronger national preparedness system with regional coordinators, a larger role for the National Guard and the Defense Department and more money for training, planning and exercises."

None of this should surprise anyone all these years into the Bush presidency. But if you really want a benchmark of where we're heading, consider the Veterans Administration as the gasping canary in the American mineshaft of civility. And think of the matter this way: While President Dwight Eisenhower warned of a "military-industrial complex" in his 1961 farewell address to the American people ("In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex..."), we have never had a president who was so determined to turn more of what once passed for civil government over to the Pentagon, an organization seemingly intent on proving in Iraq and elsewhere that reconstruction and civil governance are nowhere in its bag of tricks. Yet from avian-flu defense to catastrophe relief, from civil reconstruction to global diplomacy and domestic intelligence-gathering, the Pentagon, whose budget dwarfs all else, is the preeminent institution in this country today, shouldering ever more of the burden ever more poorly.

So when what is most "civil" in the military starts to falter as well, all of us should take note. In this case, as Judith Coburn reports below, the health-care and disability system for American veterans -- the very men and women this administration so cavalierly sent off to its war of choice in Iraq -- is in a state of increasing disarray and faces a wounded administration that secretly likes to think of the medical care of veterans as another form of welfare to be slashed. Tom

Coming Home from War on the Cheap

Shortchanging the Wounded
By Judith Coburn

On the eve of his Marine unit's assault on Falluja in November, 2004, Blake Miller read to his men from the Bible (John 14:2-3): "In my father's house, there are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I leave this place and go there to prepare a place for you, so that where I may be, you may be also."

A photograph of Miller's blood-smeared, filthy face, so reminiscent of David Douglas Duncan's photos of war-weary Marines in Vietnam, is one of the Iraq War's iconic images. Over a hundred newspapers ran it. But as the San Francisco Chronicle reported recently, Miller, a decorated war hero, has been shattered psychologically by Iraq. Disabled by flashbacks and nightmares, he continues to pay daily and dearly for his service there.

His eloquent commitment to his fellow Marines is the highest value in military life. But the Bush administration, which sent Blake Miller, his fellow Marines, and 1.3 million other Americans (so far) to war in Iraq and Afghanistan apparently does not share this commitment.

Much has been written about how President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld waged war on the cheap, sending too few ill-equipped young soldiers -- 30% of them ill-trained Reservists and National Guardsmen -- into battle. But little has been reported about how shockingly on-the-cheap the homecomings of these soldiers have proved to be. The Bush administration awarded Blake Miller a medal, but it has fought for three long years to deny soldiers like him the care they need. While Miller and his men were being thrown into the fire in Falluja, the White House was proposing to cut the combat pay of soldiers like them. (Only an outburst of outrage across the political spectrum caused the administration to back off from that suggestion.)

The Veterans Administration, now run by a former Republican National Committeeman, has been subjected to the same radical hatcheting that the White House has tried to wield against the rest of America's safety net. Cutbacks, cooking the books, privatization schemes, even a proposal to close down the VA's operations have all been in evidence. The administration's inside-the-beltway supporters like the Heritage Foundation and famed anti-tax radical Grover Norquist like to equate VA care with welfare. Traditionally, however, most Americans have held that the VA's medical care and disability compensation was earned by those who served their country.

Unfortunately, in our draft-free country, the fight to protect the Veteran's Administration and to fully fund it has gone on largely out of public sight. Other than the Washington Post and the Associated Press, relatively few journalistic organizations have bothered to regularly cover the VA. The fight over it that White House hatchetmen, VA political appointees, and their allies in Congress have had with Congressional critics (Democratic and Republican) along with veterans' organizations has been monitored closely only by veterans' websites like Larry Scott's VAWatchdog.org, veteransforcommonsense.org and military.com.

"Enron-styled Accounting"

While national deficits soar, thanks in part to skyrocketing war costs, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are flooding into the increasingly underfunded VA system. The Pentagon says that 2,389 Americans have died and 17,648 have been wounded in combat in Iraq (and another 285 have died in Afghanistan). But these casualty figures seem to be significant undercounts. After all, 144,424 American veterans have sought treatment from the VA system since returning from those wars, not including soldiers actually hospitalized in military hospitals.

These figures were wrested only recently from the Veteran's Administration after years of fruitless demands from Democrats on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee. The 144,424 figure includes not only many of those 17,648 reported wounded in combat by the Pentagon -- if that figure is, in fact, accurate -- but those wounded psychologically, those injured in accidents, and those whose ailments were caused or exacerbated by service in the war. (Think of war, in this sense, as an extreme sport in its toll on the body.) Of course, neither Pentagon, nor VA figures for the wounded include estimates of those soldiers or veterans who don't show up at a Department of Defense (DoD) or VA facility. Among these casualties are post-combat-tour suicides (who obviously can't show up) and the victims of diseases like leishmaniasis, caused by the ubiquitous sand flies in Iraq, who often suffer on their own.

Nonetheless, the VA has admitted -- and it's been confirmed by an Army study -- that a staggering 35% of veterans who served in Iraq have already sought treatment in the VA system for emotional problems from the war. Add this to the older veterans, especially from the Vietnam era, pouring into the VA system as their war wounds, both physical and emotional, deepen with age or as, on retirement, they find they can no longer afford private health insurance and realize that VA health care is -- or, at least in the past, was -- more generous than Medicare.

Just as the Pentagon failed, after its March 2003 invasion of Iraq, to plan for keeping the peace, guarding against looting, fighting a resilient insurgency, or handling a civil war, so has the Veterans Administration failed to plan for caring for casualties of the war. The VA admitted recently that 33,858 more vets showed up for treatment in just the first quarter of FY2006 than were expected for the entire year. Do the math yourself. Multiply times 4, assuming that the war goes on injuring Americans at current levels, and you get a possible underestimate of 135,000 casualties for the year.

Even more distressing, the San Diego Union recently reported that mentally ill soldiers are being sent back to war armed only with antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs. The Union quotes Sydney Hickey of the National Military Family Association as saying that "more than 200,000 prescriptions for the most common antidepressants were written in the last 14 months for service members and their families." According to the Union, an Army study also found that 17% of combat-seasoned infantrymen suffer from major depression, anxiety, or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after a single tour in Iraq. California Sen. Barbara Boxer has called for an investigation.

Are such chronic underestimates merely the result of incompetence? Not according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress's investigative arm. In a series of reports on the Veterans Administration over the last three years, the GAO found that the VA's top officials submitted budget requests based on cost limits demanded by the White House, not on realistic expectations of how many veterans would actually need medical care or disability support.

In repeated testimony before Congress, top VA political appointees have opposed demands by veterans' groups like the American Legion and the Disabled Veterans of America to increase significantly funds for medical care and disability payments for the new patients now flooding the system. Top VA officials assured Congress that more money wasn't needed because the agency had stepped up "management efficiencies." But the GAO found that, from 2003-2006, there were no obvious management efficiencies whatsoever to offset the increased treatment costs from the Iraq War, nor did the VA even have a methodology for reporting on such alleged efficiencies.

While the GAO's findings, when describing the VA's budget manipulations, were couched in such relatively polite bureaucratic euphemisms as "misleading," "lacked a methodology," and "does not have a reliable basis," the conclusions nonetheless were striking. "The GAO report confirms what everyone has known all along," American Legion National Commander Thomas L. Bock commented. "The VA's health-care budget has been built on false claims of 'efficiency' savings, false actuarial assumptions and an inability to collect third-party reimbursements -- money owed them. This budget model has turned our veterans into beggars, forced to beg for the medical care they earned and, by law, deserve. These deceptions are especially unconscionable when American men and women are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Some veterans are calling it fraud. Rep. Lane Evans (Dem.-Ill.) of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee calls it "Enron-styled accounting."

Budget Busting

The economic realities of the wars the Bush administration has taken us into are, in truth, budget busting. A recent study by Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard management expert Linda Biones -- that actually factored the costs of "coming home" into war expenditures -- sets the total cost of the Iraq War between $1 and 2 trillion, including $122 billion in disability payments and $92 billion in health care for veterans.

Pentagon health-care costs for soldiers still in the military have doubled in the last five years and are projected to total $64 billion or 12% of the official Pentagon budget by 2015, according to William Winkenwerder, Jr., Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. Soaring American medical costs are only partly to blame. Advances in combat medical care have also meant that far more wounded soldiers are being kept alive than in earlier wars, many of them with serious brain injuries and/or multiple amputations. Taking care of these tragically maimed soldiers for life will be extraordinarily costly, both in terms of medical care and their 100% disability payments. (The VA rates disability on a scale of 0 to 100%, which then determines the size of the monthly disability payment due a veteran.)

Even before recent veterans began flooding the system, the VA was already underfunded and being criticized for poor services. Then, three years ago, Rep. Evans and Rep. Chris H. Smith, (Rep.-NJ), Chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, raised the alarm that the VA, already short of funds, would face a catastrophe as the troops began returning from Iraq.

Smith was rewarded for his efforts to sound the alarm by being removed not just from his chairmanship, but from the committee altogether, by the House Republican leadership. Similarly, in November 2004, VA head Anthony Principi was forced out by the White House because of his opposition to the VA being shortchanged in the budget the White House demanded -- so lobbyists for veterans believe. But Principi seems not to have suffered from his VA experience. The Los Angeles Times reported recently that a medical services company Principi headed, and returned to after running the VA, earned over a billion dollars in fees, much of it from contracts approved while Principi was VA chief.

The VA admits its disability system was overburdened even before the administration invaded Iraq; and, by 2004, it had a backlog of 300,000 disability claims. Now, the VA reports that the backlog has reached 540,122. By April 2006, 25% of rating claims took six months to process -- no small thing for a veteran wounded badly enough to be unable to work. An appeal of a rejected claim frequently takes years to settle. One hundred twenty-three thousand disability claims have been filed already by veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, in its budget requests, the administration has constantly resisted congressional demands to increase the number of VA staffers processing such claims.

The True Cost of Coming Home

Congress has fought the White House over its low VA budgets for several years. In the FY 2006 budget, all Congress could finally grant the VA was $990 million above the agency's already meager request -- an increase of just 3.6% over the previous year despite the rise in casualties to be treated. In fact, top VA officials now admit it would take a 14% increase in the present budget simply to keep up with the inflation in medical costs.

Rep. Evans estimates that there has been a $4 billion shortfall in VA funding in the years 2003-06. In 2005, the White House admitted that, for medical services alone, the VA was short $1 billion for the year -- and another estimated $2.6 billion in 2006.

What may ultimately swamp the Veterans Administration's ability to cope is the emotional toll of combat -- unless it jettisons thousands of returning soldiers. Nearly one in three veterans has been hospitalized at the VA, or visited a VA outpatient clinic, due to an initial diagnosis of a mental-health disorder, according to the VA itself. Its numbers are consistent with a recent Army study on soldiers who served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Such a rate might add up over time (depending on how long these wars last) to almost half a million veterans in need of treatment -- or more. A 2004 study of several Army and Marine units returning from Iraq and Afghanistan that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine found only 23-40% of those with PTSD had sought treatment. And post-traumatic stress is called "post" for a reason -- its most serious symptoms usually emerge long after the trauma is over.

Listen to the VA's own national advisory board on PTSD in a report released in February, 2006:

"[The] VA cannot meet the ongoing needs of veterans of past deployments while also reaching out to new combat veterans of [Iraq and Afghanistan] and their families within current resources and current models of treatment."

The VA is now paying out $4.3 billion a year for PTSD disability to 215,871 veterans. The report also found that a returning war veteran suffering from emotional illness now has to wait an average of 60 days before he or she can even be evaluated for diagnosis, let alone treated. Forty-two percent of VA primary care clinics had no mental-health staff members and 53% of those that did had only one. Eighty-two percent of new patients needed to be in the most intensive PTSD treatment programs, the VA report found, but 40% of those programs were already so full that they could only take a few more patients; 20% said they were too full to take any at all.

"VA's data show a 30% increase in the number of [Iraq and Afghan War] veterans who have an initial diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder from the end of FY 2005," says Rep. Michael Michaud (Dem.-Me). "I applaud the courage of these veterans who have sought help, but the administration refuses to acknowledge fully the demand and need for mental health services."

Further down the line: How many Iraqi veterans will eventually join the ranks of the 400,000 homeless vets on the streets of American cities? (Right now the VA takes care of only 100,000 such vets, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans.)

This dire situation has only encouraged the budget cutters and anti-government radicals like Norquist, who once joked that he hoped to shrink the government enough so that he could drown it in a bathtub. With PTSD rates soaring among vets, the hatchets have been out not just when it comes to treating them, but even when it comes to the diagnosis of PTSD itself. In 2005, the VA, under White House pressure, announced that it was reopening 72,000 long-approved PTSD disability claims for review, many of them for Vietnam veterans. Right-wing columnists quickly swung into action with op-ed pieces insisting that many PTSD claims were fraudulent. The VA backed off -- but only after a New Mexico newspaper reported that a troubled Vietnam veteran with a 100% PTSD disability killed himself upon fearing that the VA might review his case and a firestorm of criticism from Congress and veterans' organizations followed.

Other White House ideas for cutting back the VA, including making vets pay insurance premiums, higher co-pays and doubling Vets' costs for prescription drugs, have also been beaten back by Congress. One VA response to its huge backlog of claims has been to limit enrollment for its services. In January 2003, the White House ordered the VA to create a new temporary cost-cutting category of "affluent" vets who would not be eligible to use the VA. But the new category seems headed for permanency. And it sets the cut-off level for eligibility for VA care so low -- around $30,000 for a so-called "affluent" family of four -- that many vets who have been cut off can't possibly afford health insurance and medical care on the private market.

In World War II, 12 million Americans fought on behalf of a nation of 130 million. Twenty-five percent of American men served in that war. They came back heroes to a country more than willing to give them the latest medical care, compensate them for their wounds, send them to college, and help them buy homes.

Fifty years later in Iraq -- an unpopular war -- only 1.3 million are fighting for a nation of 300 million. "Never have so few sacrificed so much for so many," one Desert Storm veteran said recently. Iraq may be the wrong cause for sacrifice. But Vietnam veterans taught us that once war starts we must be willing to take care of everyone who gets hurt in it.

Judith Coburn has covered war and its aftermath in Indochina, Central America, and the Middle East for the Village Voice, Mother Jones, the Los Angeles Times, and Tomdispatch, among other media outlets.

[Apr. 6, 2006] TheStar.com - Spirit of DeLay lives on in Congress Spirit of DeLay lives on in Congress

It would be tempting to herald the resignation of Tom DeLay — former majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives — as the end of an era. Tempting, but premature. DeLay, who was indicted last September on election-related money laundering charges, was a friend of Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist, who was last week sentenced to almost six years in prison for fraud and corruption.

DeLay rose to prominence in 1994 in tandem with Newt Gingrich, the former speaker, when the Republicans took control of both houses for the first time in a generation. Brandishing his "Contract with America," Gingrich promised to put an end to the era of big government and to cut back drastically on the thicket of federal regulations.

With less fanfare, DeLay launched the "K Street Project" that sought to persuade, flatter and cajole Washington's lobby groups into the Republican camp. Gingrich was outfoxed in a budget battle with president Bill Clinton in 1995 and his Republican Revolution lost steam. DeLay, meanwhile, went from strength to strength. More than a decade later, it is evident which of the two men had a more lasting influence on the workings of America's federal government.

Since 1994 the number of lobby groups registered in Washington has risen almost fourfold to 36,000. The cost of "earmarks," by which lawmakers insert unrelated special interest subsidies into broader spending bills, skyrocketed to $62 billion last year. And America's tax system has gone from thicket to forest. According to the Cato Institute, the number of pages of federal tax rules rose from 40,500 in 1995 to 66,498 this year.

DeLay's K Street Project bears much of the blame for the deterioration in the quality of legislation. That decline was also in evidence last week when the Senate passed a heavily diluted version of plans to curtail the influence of lobby groups. It cut from $50 to $20 the cost of meals lawmakers can accept from lobbyists. But it left untouched "study trips" in which lobbyists fund the travels of lawmakers to plush resorts in exotic locations. Among the lobbyists breathing a sigh of relief last week were 29 former DeLay staff employees. Two others, including Delay's former deputy chief of staff, have been indicted on corruption charges.

Meanwhile, John Boehner, who replaced DeLay as majority leader, yesterday praised his predecessor's "integrity and honour." Boehner came to the job promising to put an end to sleaze, in spite of having been caught distributing campaign cheques from the tobacco industry on the house floor in 1995. DeLay is quitting Congress. But his soul is marching on.

---

This is an edited version of an editorial that appeared yesterday in the Financial Times, London.

Discussing the 'martyrdom' of Judith Miller - The Situation with Tucker Carlson - MSNBC.com

To read an excerpt of their conversation, continue to the text below. To watch the video, click on the "Launch" button to the right.

TUCKER CARLSON:  Don't you think all this anger at Judy Miller is really misplaced?  I mean, she's a newspaper reporter.  She didn't lead us to war in Iraq, but listening to people talk about her, you'd think she single-handedly convinced Don Rumsfeld that we ought to invade Baghdad. 

ROSA BROOKS:  Well, Tucker, No. 1, the media likes to talk about the media.  ... No. 2, I think you've actually put your finger on it.  It's precisely because the media feels so powerless to affect the people who are really out there making the decisions that Judy Miller is an easy target. 

Now, I think she is totally misguided, but I also think that the media is pretty fickle, and we saw a few months ago, she was the martyr of the day, the saint of the day.  And now she's the villain of the day.  It's kind of hard to explain that, except by thinking that it's got something to do with the media feeling anxious about its own role. 

CARLSON:  I think you're right partly, and I don't fully understand why people despise Judy Miller so much.  I don't know Judy Miller.  I like her stories well enough.  She seems like a decent enough person.  But that's not the point. 

It seems to me that most of the criticism aimed at her is coming from the left, almost all of it, in fact.  It does sort of break down along those lines.  All of the liberal web sites, attacking Judy Miller.  Arianna Huffington, finding a new purpose in life, much needed, by attacking Judy Miller day after day.  What is that about?  Why are liberals mad at her?

BROOKS:  Liberals are mad at her for a couple of reasons, Tucker.  No.  1, liberals are mad at her for essentially being a P.R. spokesperson for the administration, in the run-up to the war in Iraq. 

She is not responsible for bringing us to war, but she played a not completely trivial role in selling the whole WMD story to the public in the newspaper record, just plowing over the objections from people saying, "Wait a second.  The evidence here is weak." 

I think the liberals are also mad at her because the press is not supposed to be that credulous.  She made everybody in the press look like a bunch of bozos.  She was not the only one. 

CARLSON:  Well, wait a second. 

BROOKS:  She was the one out there. 

CARLSON:  American intelligence, the CIA, French intelligence, Israeli intelligence, Mossad Israeli intelligence, members of Congress, leaders of both parties all believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  Why is the "New York Times" supposed to find something different?

BROOKS:  You know, that's fair enough Tucker, and I'm a very trusting person, so when our government said there were WMD's, of course I thought, "Well, gosh, maybe they must be right." 

CARLSON:  That's what I thought, too. 

BROOKS:  On the other hand, one of the things that we hear now is that there are a lot of internal sources, both within the administration and within the media, who were casting doubts on that.  That there was a lot of dissent, and that part of the problem was not just the sort of group think, but an active effort to shut up all the dissenters, and that Judy Miller played her part in that. 

CARLSON:  Don't you think Judy Miller now represents -- she's come to symbolize the dissenters, those who would take their lumps in an effort to bring the message to the rest of us.  I mean, the message of what the government is doing to Judy Miller is, to government employees, don't talk to the press.  Don't leak.  And isn't leaking good for us?  Don't we have a right to know what goes on behind closed doors in Washington?

The legendary second-term smackdown that has paralyzed recent U.S. presidents could be just around the corner for George W. Bush.

With the scent of political blood hanging in the autumn air, the White House is proceeding with business as usual as a federal prosecutor decides whether to lay charges against officials in the highest echelons of the Bush administration.
 But analysts from all sides of the political spectrum expect charges are coming, sparking an unprecedented crisis for Bush, perhaps within days.
The president's inner circle is desperately trying to keep the focus of Patrick Fitzgerald's probe on a technical and arcane leak of a CIA operative's name, but the fears are that he is prepared to shine an unwelcome light on a White House team established to sell Americans on a pre-ordained Iraq war as early as the summer of 2002.
The earlier targets of tprobe, Bush's trusted political adviser Karl Rove, and Vice-President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, are still in the crosshairs, but there are now reports that Cheney's role in the so-called "CIA leak" probe has also come under scrutiny.
For nearly two years, Fitzgerald, a by-the-book Chicago prosecutor, has been investigating whether laws were broken when the name of CIA officer Valerie Plame was leaked to the media. It is illegal to publicly identify covert CIA officers.
Her name first appeared in the U.S. media on July 14, 2003, thought to be retribution against her husband, former U.S. diplomat Joseph Wilson, who'd emerged as a loud and damaging critic of the Bush administration's rationale for the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and raised questions in The New York Times eight days earlier.
That has already cast attention back on an eight-member group formed by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card in August 2002, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG), and there are suggestions Fitzgerald will reopen the entire debate over a White House that massaged intelligence and engaged in apocalyptic rhetoric to justify a war that was already a fait accompli.
At issue is whether the group, potentially with Cheney's knowledge, sought to discredit Wilson as part of its communications strategy because he was getting in the way of carefully choreographed claims that Saddam Hussein harboured weapons of mass destruction that threatened the U.S.
Time magazine reports this week that Rove and Libby have already indicated they will resign if Fitzgerald returns indictments by Oct. 28, when the term of a grand jury expires.
A source told Time that Rove, the man Bush proudly calls his "architect," would make a clean break and not coach from the sidelines.
The Bloomberg news agency has quoted sources who say Fitzgerald is focusing on Cheney's role. While there is no indication the vice-president could be indicted, Fitzgerald has the freedom to produce a report that could heavily damage the vice-president.
Part of the feeding frenzy in this town is a result of the tight-lipped Fitzgerald and a clampdown on official comments from the White House.
"There's a serious investigation," Bush said yesterday. "We're not going to — I'm not going to — pre-judge the outcome of the investigation.''
Six of the eight WHIG members, including Rove and Libby, have testified to the grand jury. Rove has been there four times, most recently last Friday.

We also learned that the consensus to forego the bullet for the ballot to change governments, which lies at the heart of democracy, only holds so long as social and economic conflict are kept below a threshold level. The former requires a separation of the church from the state, and the latter a strong middle class to act as a buffer between the rich and the poor. None of the countries to which Bush has carried the banner of democracy satisfies either criterion. In Iraq, the overwhelming majority of the dominant Shias want an Islamic republic, whatever that may be. In East Europe, there is not even the beginnings of a middle class. Imposing the template of democracy on such societies is likely to yield freakish results. Imposing it by force at the expense of destroying a pre-existent state can lead to chaos.
 

Foreign Policy --The Military-Industrial Complex--By James Fallows

Has U.S. politics shifted to the right? The domestic records of two 20th-century Republican presidents, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, remove any doubt. Nixon took stands that would make him an isolated leftist among modern Democrats. He enforced (albeit grudgingly) school busing and racial-quota hiring plans, established the Environmental Protection Agency, redirected federal funds to state and municipal welfare programs, and tried to enact a "guaranteed annual income." Eisenhower sent troops to make sure schools were integrated and enacted public-works programs on a scale not seen since his time: For transportation, the interstate highways. For public health, the polio-vaccine campaign. For education and science, the flow of federal funds to local schools after Sputnik. The only Democrat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a comparably liberal record of accomplishment is Lyndon Johnson, with Medicare and the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Yet Eisenhower's most celebrated "liberal" statement, indeed the only statement of his that endures, has been misinterpreted through most of the last generation. In his farewell address, delivered a few days before John Kennedy took office, Eisenhower gave his famous warning against "the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." The phrase entered the lexicon, and at least within the little tribe of speechwriters it ensured the fame of its creator, Malcolm Moos. (Some accounts say that Ralph Williams, a Navy captain detailed to the White House, was also involved.) But only in the last few years have the implications of the military-industrial complex again taken on Eisenhower's original meaning.

In his speech, Eisenhower stressed the novelty of the large, permanent defense establishment, which had been created to fight World War II and then expanded because of the Cold War, and the open-endedness of its potential effects. "This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience," he said. "The total influence--economic, political, even spiritual--is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government." But most historians suggest that Eisenhower's principal concern was budgetary. That is, the military itself, its allied contractors, and the appropriators in Congress all shared an interest in trumpeting potential perils and then building weapons to offset them. Eisenhower had been particularly soured by the "missile gap" controversy of the late 1950s--the bogus suggestion that the United States had fallen behind the Soviet Union in strategic missiles and therefore needed to build fast to catch up. Eisenhower's sensitivity to this issue was the more acute since Kennedy had campaigned hard on the "missile gap" as a symbol of Republican failures.

As Eisenhower's phrase entered popular usage over the next decade, its shadings changed. When people warned about the influence of the military-industrial complex in the 1960s, they usually were talking about an increased risk of actually going to war. The human symbol of this concern was Gen. Curtis LeMay. In the 1940s, he had directed the firebombings of Tokyo that killed as many people as the atomic bomb did in Hiroshima. In the 1950s, as head of the Strategic Air Command, he recommended the use of nuclear weapons against China to end the Korean War. Later, he drew up plans for a preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. In the 1960s, as Air Force chief of staff, he recommended a nuclear attack on Cuba to remove the Soviet missile bases, and he later criticized Kennedy for taking the cowardly path of a naval blockade. (He ended his public career as George Wallace's running mate, in 1968.)

It was with men like LeMay in mind that Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey wrote their influential early-1960s novel about a military coup, Seven Days in May. During the Vietnam era, the military-industrial complex was a shorthand reference to the interests that presumably kept profiting from the war. Brown and Root, building those bases in the jungle? Dow Chemical, with its napalm? The view of the war industries as warmongers reached its peak in the early 1990s with Oliver Stone's movie JFK. In the climactic scene, the shadowy figure played by Donald Sutherland explains that, of course, Kennedy had to be killed, because if he had lived he would have pulled out of Vietnam and the big industrialists wouldn't have made so much money.

Vietnam was crucial in the history of the military-industrial complex, but not in the way Stone's film indicated. The oft-discussed Powell doctrine was part of the military's response to Vietnam. Its stated purpose was to keep the military from being misused, but a side effect was to make the use of military force less likely. Through at least the last decade, the more that military commanders have had to say about a decision, the less likely the United States has been to send troops. The debate leading up to the Bush administration's Iraq decision is the latest illustration.

With a more cautious approach to troop commitment, the military-industrial complex has returned to the situation that worried Eisenhower: it doesn't matter whether weapons are used (or usable), as long as they are bought. The military budget is, of course, growing rapidly. Two years ago, the United States spent as much on the military as the next eight countries combined. Last year, as much as the next 15 combined. This year, as much as the next 20. Yet it is hard to match the pattern of spending to the nature of new threats. Consider the F-22 Raptor fighter plane, which was designed in George H.W. Bush's administration. Each plane will cost well over $100 million, perhaps twice that much. The expense is mainly for measures that would allow the aircraft to penetrate a Soviet air defense system that disappeared more than a decade ago.

Since the United States has ended up with so much more imposing a force than any adversary, perhaps the complex should be thanked rather than criticized? Well, no, for exactly the reasons that Eisenhower foresaw: "economic, political, even spiritual." The economic problem is that the federal government no longer has enough money to throw around without a plan. The political problem is the distortion of the process of public choice. Pentagon budget analyst Franklin Chuck Spinney uses the term "political engineering" to describe the parceling out of defense subcontracts to the districts of influential members of Congress. The more senators and representatives are dealt into the arrangements, the harder it is for them to exercise independent judgment.

The most profound source of concern may be what Eisenhower called spiritual: the corrupting effect on the uniformed military by their alliance with contractors. Most career soldiers leave the service by their mid-40s. A tiny handful last until their mid-50s, and nearly all the retirees look for a second career. Far and away the most lucrative opportunities are with defense industries. Knowing that their careers will end this way, soldiers face difficult decisions while still in uniform. Two valuable recent books, Path to Victory by Maj. Donald Vandergriff and Boyd by Robert Coram, consider the distortions of today's military career path.

The United States is back where Eisenhower started, with a renewed appreciation of the problem posed by a military-industrial complex--and recognition of his advice that "only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry" could bring it under control.

James Fallows is the national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and won the American Book Award for National Defense (New York: Random House, 1981).

Requiem for the Powell Doctrine

Articulated by Gen. Powell when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, the Powell Doctrine was designed to avoid, as Powell once put it, "halfhearted warfare for half-baked reasons that the American people could not understand or support." The Powell Doctrine held that military force should only be used if there was a clear risk to national security; that the force used should be overwhelming; and that the operation must have strong public support and a clear exit strategy.

Still sound advice in an even-more dangerous world. But Secretary of State Powell, like the president he serves, apparently has had a change of heart. Secretary Powell endorses the Liberian adventure, which fails the Powell Doctrine Test on all counts. His current views, as expressed in a July 23 interview with the Washington Times, sound, well, half-baked.

In the interview, Powell admitted, "If you ask the question, 'What is our strategic, vital interest?' it will be hard to define it that way." However, he argued, we have "a historic link to Liberia," an interest in making sure West Africa doesn't "come apart," and "an interest in showing the people of Africa that we can support efforts to stabilize a tragic situation."

In 1992, a more cautious and skeptical Colin Powell warned the public about what could happen when our forces are put in harm's way with a vague injunction to "do good." He declared: "We must not... send military forces into a crisis with an unclear mission they cannot accomplish -- such as we did when we sent the U.S. Marines into Lebanon in 1983. We inserted those proud warriors into the middle of a five-faction civil war complete with terrorists, hostage-takers, and a dozen spies in every camp, and said, 'Gentlemen, be a buffer.' The results were 241 Marines and Navy personnel killed and a U.S. withdrawal."

Military-Industrial Complex -- a good collection of annotated links.

What is the military industrial complex

War Is A Racket - Major General Smedley Butler. According to Butler, World War I cost the U.S. 52 billion dollars, giving 16 billion in profits to private corporations. He illustrated the significance of this by comparing the profits of several large companies before and during the war.

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

Military-Industrial Complex Revisited Mission Implausable

This "two war" scenario is implausible in the extreme. As Michael Klare has masterfully demonstrated in his book, Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws, Colin Powell devised the two war strategy once he realized that the United States was "running out of enemies" large enough to justify spending hundreds of billions on the Pentagon every year. Klare also demonstrates that the two "major regional conflicts" that are the building blocks of the Pentagon’s new spending scenario both involve theoretical regional adversaries that are far better armed and equipped than existing regional powers like Iraq or North Korea.⁴

Michael Klare is not alone in suggesting that the new threats to U.S. security have been greatly exaggerated. Pentagon budget analyst Franklin Spinney has bluntly asserted that "the Pentagon’s two war strategy is just a marketing device to justify a high budget." Merrill McPeak, who served as Air Force Chief of Staff during and after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, has also weighed in on this issue:

We should walk away from the two war strategy. Neither our historical experience nor our common sense leads us to think we need to do this. We’ve had to fight three major regional contingencies in the past 45 years—Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. One comes along every 15 years or so—two have never come along simultaneously.⁵

For those who question whether conflicts like Vietnam or the Gulf War were essential to U.S. security, McPeak’s estimate of one major conflict every 15 years can be extended to one every twenty to thirty years. And, as we will discuss later, the U.S. military budget could be sharply reduced if our government would take concerted action to prevent conflict. A preventive strategy would be far cheaper and more effective than the current approach of marshaling huge, expensive forces to prepare for contingencies that are unlikely to occur. This point is borne out by the war in Kosovo, where it has become painfully evident that the costly application of high tech military force is the wrong tool for dealing with ethnic conflicts and civil wars. By forcing the withdrawal of human rights monitors and humanitarian organizations that had been operating in the province, the NATO bombing campaign actually made it easier for Serb forces to drive ethnic Albanians out of Kosovo at gunpoint. And by intervening in an internal conflict without seeking the consent of the United Nations Security Council, the United States and its NATO allies have confronted one illegitimate use of force--ethnic cleansing in Kosovo--with another--NATO’s unauthorized bombing campaign. Meanwhile, relatively inexpensive measures that might have stopped the killing in Kosovo sooner--such as a beefed-up monitoring presence by the woefully underfunded Organization for Security and Cooperation (OSCE) in Europe or a well-funded United Nations peacekeeping effort--were cast aside in favor of an ill-considered air war.⁶

Krushchev on Eisenhower and Cold War Military Industrial Complex

However, we must also keep in mind the true character of all imperialists, capitalists, monopolists, and militarists who are interested in making money out of the political tension between nations. We must make sure we don't allow allow ourselves to get involved in a lot of senseless competition with the West over military spending. If we try to compete with America in any of the most essential areas of military preparedness, we will be doing two harmful things. First we will be further enriching wealthy aggressive capitalist circles in the United States who use our own military buildup as a pretext for overloading their own country's arms budget. Second we will be exhausting our material resources without raising the living standards of our people. We must remember that the fewer people we have in the army, the more people we will have for more productive kinds of work. This realization would be a common point of departure for the progessive forces of the world in their search for peacefull coexistence. If one side were to curtail its accumulation of military means, it would be easier for the other side to the same. We must be prepared to strike back against our enemy, but we must also ask, "Where there is an end to this spiraling competition?"

I know from experience that the leaders of the armed forces can be very persistent in claiming their share when it comes time to allocate funds. Every commander has all sorts of very convincing arguments why he should get more than anyone else. Unfortunately there is a tendency for people who run the armed forces to be greedy and self--seeking. They're always ready to throw in your face the slogan "If you try to economize on the country's defenses today, you will pay in blood when war breaks out tommorrow." I am not denying that these men have a huge responsibility, and I am not impugning their moral qualities. But the fact remains that the living standard of the country suffers when the budget is overloaded with allocations to unproductive branches of consumption. And today as yesterday, the most unproductive expenditures are all of those made on the armed forces. That's why I think that military leaders can't be reminded too often that it is government which must allocate funds, and it is government which must decide how much the armed forces can spend.

Apparently the control of military spending is a universal problem. I remember a conversation I once had with President Eisenhower when I was guest at his dacha at Camp David [in September 1959]. we went for talks together and had some useful informal talks. During one of those talks, he asked, "Tell me, Mr. Krushchev, how did you decide the question of funds for military expenses?" Then before I had a chance to say anything, he said, "Perhaps first I should tell you how it is with us."

"Well how is it with you?"

He smiled, and I smiled back at him. I had a feeling what he was going to say. "Its like this. My military leaders come to me and say, 'Mr. President, we need such and such a sum for such and such a program.' I say, 'Sorry we don't have the funds.' They say, 'We have reliable information that the Soviet Union has already allocated funds for their own such program. Therefore if we dont get the funds we need, we will fall behind the Soviet Union.' So I give in. That's how they wring money out of me. They keep grabbing for more and I keep giving it to them. Now tell me, how is it with you?"

"It's just the same. Some people from our military department come and say, 'Comrade Krushchev, look at this! The Americans are developing such and such a system. We could develop the same system, but it would cost such and such' I tell them there's no money; its been alloted already. So they say, 'If we don't get the money we need and if there's a war, then the enemy will have superiority over us.' So we discuss it some more, and I end up giving them the money they ask for." "Yes" he said, "that's what I thought. You know, we really should come to some sort of an agreement in order to stop this fruitless, really wasteful rivalry."

"I'd like to do that. Part of my reason for coming here was to see if some sort of an agreement would come out of these meetings and conversations."

But we coudn't agree then, and we can't agree now. I don't know. Maybe it's impossible to agree.

Forbes.com Military-Industrial Complex, 2003 a pro-military-industrial complex viewpoint...

The center of gravity of defense manufacturing has shifted decisively back into the civilian sector, as well. Large contractors still assemble the guidance system and explosive in a smart bomb and the complex mix of steel and silicon that makes up a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. But the components that account for much of the cost and all of the astounding precision and agility of the new weapons--powerful chips, together with the countless layers of software that make them function--are manufactured by the same companies that build microprocessors for PCs and amplifiers for cell phones. It is the huge civilian demand for PCs, digital assistants, cell phones, high-tech cars and smart appliances that has made these components as cheap and disposable as bullets.

This isn't to say that the technology moves only in one direction. Integrated circuits emerged from aerospace programs in the 1960s; gallium arsenide semiconductor amplifiers that make possible the compact, cheap cell phone were pioneered by TRW for defense purposes a decade ago. The indium phosphide, gallium nitride and silicon carbide power chips that will land in consumer electronics a decade hence are being developed today in R&D programs funded by the military.

As a part-time partner in a small venture capital firm, I have visited dozens of innovative startups that have developed new semiconductors, lasers, sensors and power-control systems under Department of Defense auspices and are now ready to begin moving their products into civilian markets. These technologies invariably started out too difficult, esoteric and expensive to be of interest to anyone but the military. The military couldn't afford them, either, but for the fact that successful information and power technologies invariably make the transition into the civilian sector, where mass production leads down the cost curve.

For volume production the military and its main contractors are now firmly committed to buying parts off the commercial shelf whenever they can. Smart weapons are mostly built from civilian components, suitably packaged and hardened for the battlefield.

Thus the military-industrial complex now consists of two relatively thin bookends to our enormous, civilian, high-tech economy. Military R&D programs push the leading-edge development of power semiconductors, software and sensors, a decade or so out ahead of Intel, Motorola or DaimlerChrysler, then encourage the migration of successful technologies out into the civilian sector as quickly as possible. Military contractors end up buying back the same technology at mass-production prices, embedding it in every vehicle, weapon and projectile on the battlefield.

"Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry," Eisenhower warned in 1961, "can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

The Military-Industrial Complex A Busy, Bizarre Bazaar

Between 1990 and 1995, our leaders exported $7 billion of surplus arms. Secretary of State Madeliene Albright commented on this phenomenon in a 1996 edition of the New York Times Magazine. "The trading of arms is disgusting and contributes to horrors around the world. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, it's a bazaar out there," she said.

What she didn't say was that 90 percent of the world arms shipments are exported by the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France - the permanent five members of the U.N. Security Council; not "rogue nations" or "hostile enemies."

In 1994, then-Secretary of Defense William Perry made a trip to Beijing to represent the United States at the first meeting of the no-longer-existing U.S.-Sino Defense Conversion Commission. The commission's mission was to help Chinese arms manufacturers switch to the production of commercial goods. Perry explained the U.S. interest in this endeavor.

"It is to our benefit to help these countries (China, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia) to resist the pressure to make weapons even beyond their needs," he said. "And secondly, to resist the pressure for foreign arms sales. One very obvious way of using the excess capacity in the arms industry in each of these countries is to continue to produce the same amount but then to sell the excess to other countries."

This, Perry continued, creates "its own set of policy and security issues. So to the extent we can be useful and constructive in diverting this pressure into the production of commercial goods, then I believe it is a security benefit."

Months later, in February 1995, Perry's insight was deemed irrelevant in drafting the Clinton administration's new conventional arms transfer policy. In fact, this do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do policy says explicitly that one of its major purposes is to preserve the U.S. arms industrial base.

So, under the pretense of staying competitive in a military-technology race with no apparent competitor, some of the most sophisticated weapons in the world are being exported. Arms sales by the United States and its allies supply the military threats that we're so worried about.

Recall that Lockheed's lobbying efforts for the F-22 "Stealth" fighters were predicated on the proliferation of U.S.-manufactured F-15Es, F-16C/Ds and F/A-18s.

Guess where Lockheed makes its F-16 "Fighting Falcon"? Forth Worth, Texas - Bush's backyard. It's a popular product among foreign militaries. As of Sept. 30, 1997, according to the Federation of American Scientists Arms Sales Monitoring Project, 1,700 F-16s had been sold to 19 countries, including Belgium, Denmark, Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, South Korea, Morocco, Norway, Pakistan, Portugal, Thailand, Turkey and Venezuela.

So while pundits debate the efficacy of the electoral college, I'm concerned about the fact that both major choices presented to the electoral college would like to see the arms bazaar continue to boom well into our future.

Foreign Policy --The Military-Industrial Complex--By James ...

Return of the 'military-industrial complex' csmonitor.com

What Is the Military-Industrial Complex

Amazon.com Books The Military-Industrial Complex
Eisenhower's Warning Three Decades Later
(American University Studies. Series X, Political Science, Vol 32)

Military - Industrial Complex and Privitization

When the Soviet Union dismantled itself in 1989 and there was no longer a Cold War to justify a huge defense apparatus in the United States, some observers thought the U.S. military-industrial complex would disappear, too. And there were, in fact, some cutbacks in defense spending. The percentage of gross domestic product devoted to the military declined from 6.3 percent at the height of the Reagan buildup to 3.6 percent in the mid-1990s.

But this did not mean that the military-industrial complex had been dismantled. It was merely awaiting the creation of a new threat, which appeared in 1991. In a war that cost very few American lives, the United States punished Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait with one of the fiercest air bombardments in history. Given the public's satisfaction with a "clean" war that seemed like an extension of a child's video game, the defense contractors looked forward to producing a whole new round of sophisticated weapons. Advanced hardware, from "smart bombs" to planes that could fly "blind," won favorable publicity. President Bush claimed that forty-one of forty-two U.S. Patriot missiles had hit their targets, the more primitive Scud missiles used by Iraq. {The statement later proved to be a gross exaggeration; according to reliable estimates few Patriot missiles ever hit their targets. Furthermore, a detailed study released by the government in 1996 revealed that high-tech bombs and missiles and the F-117 Stealth fighter plane were not any more effective than the older, far cheaper aircraft and weaponry that previously comprised most of the U.S. arsenal.

This analysis of effectiveness came far too late. Shortly after the Gulf War ended in 1991, the Pentagon announced that it was awarding a new contract to the Lockheed Corporation for the production of an updated Stealth fighter plane that would cost $65 billion. And this was not the only windfall from the war. The recklessness of Saddam Hussein allowed the Pentagon and its allies to begin a campaign to convince the Congress and the American public that a new foreign threat existed. They called it the "rogue state." According to defense analysts, rogue states operated outside the norms of civilized nations and were determined to unleash terror against larger, more pacific countries. One drawback to the theory was that the states in question were generally economic and military weaklings: Cuba, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, and Libya. Their combined military spending amounted to only $9.4 billion in 1995. In comparison, the NATO countries, not counting the United States, spent $147.6 billion on defense, while the U.S. itself was spending $264 billion, 40 percent of the world's total military dollars.

It is unclear whether the rogue state hypothesis was convincing to the general public, but few people protested when the Congress added $11.2 billion on top of President Clinton's requested military budget for 1997. Overall defense spending was staying fairly stable despite steady reductions in the number of armed forces personnel and the continued closings of superfluous military bases. Corporate contractors did not suffer from such cutbacks. The B-2 Stealth bomber, which had never flown in combat and cost more than $2 billion per aircraft, was funded again. The price of a variety of "smart bombs, " either already being built or on order, was $58 billion. Secretary of Defense William Perry told contractors that spending on new weapons systems would increase from $38 billion in 1996 to $60 billion per year in 2000.5 Overall military expenditures in 1997 were maintained at a level that would allow the United States to fight a major war, even though there were no significant military opponents in sight.

In fact, as the twenty-first century begins, the Pentagon continues to argue that it should be able to fight not one, but two major wars in two different parts of the globe at the same time. Retired Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak gave an honest assessment of this argument: "The two-war strategy is just a marketing device to justify a high budget."

The Independent Institute World War II and the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex, by Robert Higgs

Congress, as usual, went where the money was. Defense-related jobs served as a major determinant of congressional defense decisions for both liberals and conservatives. Members of Congress strove to steer contracts and subcontracts to favored constituents, who rewarded them in turn with lavish campaign contributions, votes, and other payoffs. Congressional micro-management of the defense program grew ever more elaborate as lawmakers grasped new opportunities to control the disposition of defense resources. Resistance to base closures, in particular, prompted the most exquisite legislative maneuvers. For more than a decade after 1977, the Pentagon found it impossible to close any large defense facility, no matter how obsolete or otherwise unwarranted. Weapons systems no longer desired by the military, such as A-7 and A-10 aircraft in the early 1980s, got extended funding, thanks to the efforts of friendly legislators.

This waste of money had many other pernicious consequences. With great corporations, powerful military authorities, and members of Congress all linked in a mutually self-serving complex, there was little incentive to end the Cold War. Not that anyone craved World War III. But wealth, position, power, and perquisites all rode on the shoulders of the MICC. The best of all worlds, then, was massive, ongoing preparation for war that would never occur. But with the nation well-prepared for war, national leaders launched more readily into military adventures like those in Korea and Vietnam, not to mention a variety of smaller projections of force abroad. Among the costs of the MICC, we might count the more than 112,000 American deaths sustained in the Cold War’s hot engagements.

In retrospect, we can see clearly that World War II spawned the MICC and that the war’s long continuation as the Cold War created the conditions in which the MICC could survive and prosper. America’s economy sacrificed much of its potential dynamism as the massive commitment of resources to military R&D diverted them from the civilian opportunities being pursued with great success in Japan, Germany, and elsewhere. For the period 1948-1989, national defense spending consumed, on average, 7.5 percent of American GNP. The costs to liberty were also great, as national defense authorities, using the FBI, CIA, and other agencies, violated people’s constitutional rights on a wide scale.

When we are tempted to look back at World War II as the “good war,” we would do well to consider the full range of its consequences.

[Sept 14, 2003]  U.S. no safer than two years ago

OrlandoSentinel.com Opinion O'Reilly and Franken deserve each other by Kathleen Parker Right wing view on Fox lawsuit

Thanks to Fox and O'Reilly, Franken's book, which zillions of Americans never would have noticed otherwise, rocketed to No. 1 on Amazon's best-seller list from 489. And Fox and O'Reilly look like thin-skinned terriers who can dish it out but run tail tucked between legs when others respond in kind.

... ... ...

The truth is, no one cares what Franken thinks about O'Reilly or what The O'Reilly Factor spins or unspins about world events.

If we watch television yak shows -- or read mean-spirited, close-to-the-bone books -- it's not for policy analysis. How much insight can one glean from 30 minutes or an hour of flush-faced confrontation among pundits mostly concerned with selling their books and increasing their speaking fees?

It's for flavah, honey. Infotainment. A break from commercials and a reaffirmation of the aphorism that familiarity breeds contempt.

None of which means that O'Reilly isn't a smart man with a considered point of view and a marketable, flamboyant style. It just means most viewers know what they're getting with the, ahem, "no-spin zone." It ain't fair and balanced, but we don't care. Most talk television is "slanted and shallow," and we like it that way. Apparently.

MediaLens.org - correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media - corporate media issues

The Disinformation Age:

How George W. Bush and Saint Colin of Powell are lying America into an
unnecessary war — and what honest journalists can do about it
By Dennis Hans

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, speaking January 19 on ABC’s Sunday morning political show “This Week,” offered the media splendid advice on how they should handle in their broadcasts and articles a leader who lies:

“Well, first, Saddam Hussein is a liar. He lies every single day. . . . He is still claiming that he won the war. His people are being told every day that they won. It was a great victory in 1991 when he was thrown out of Kuwait and chased back to Baghdad. Now, it seems to me that almost every time you quote something from him, you should preface it by saying ‘here’s a man who has lied all the time and consistently’” ( http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Jan2003/t01192003_t19sdabc.html).

Actually, that’s no longer necessary with Saddam. Nothing he says has been taken at face value since the 1980s, that golden decade when he was committing his worst human rights abuses with the blessing and support of Saint Colin of Powell and presidents Reagan and Bush — not to mention Reagan’s special emissary to Baghdad, a chap named Donald Rumsfeld.

There is a lying leader, a bit closer to home, to whom our news media should apply Rummy’s good advice. Not only does the leader lie, but so too do his top aides. And the news media, with rare exceptions, routinely pass along their lies as fact. The result is that the people of America are out of touch with the people of the world. Thus we’re far more willing than any other populace to launch an unprovoked attack on Iraq. Whereas the German and French people — and the populations ruled by governments siding with Uncle Sam — are reasonably well-informed and overwhelmingly opposed, Americans are reasonably well-disinformed.

If Brokaw, Rather, Jennings and Lehrer have an ounce of integrity, they’ll apply Rummy’s remedy to the pronouncements on Iraq by George W. Bush and his top aides. I recommend this pre-interview and -soundbite preface:

“Here is a president [secretary of defense, secretary of state, national security adviser] who, when it comes to Iraq, repeatedly lies, exaggerates, misrepresents, deletes crucial context, or states actual facts in a manner cleverly designed to leave a false impression. Viewer beware.”

How The Media Enable And Enhance White House Deceit

For an administration headed by a purported plain-spoken straight shooter — a Texan who will look you in the eye and tell it like it is — it sure has mastered an awful lot of techniques of deceit.

The techniques of deceit I describe below are simple and transparent. It requires but half a brain and an ounce of courage to expose them. We should praise the too-few exposers and ridicule and badger the countless facilitators of flim-flam. We should single out the latter by name and demand they clean up their act or get out of the profession.

Not being privy to the brains of individual journalists, I can’t say why any particular one behaves as he or she does. Clearly, many factors, both institutional and personal, help to explain why Bob Woodward, Wolf Blitzer and John McWethy are war-team toadies while Dana Millbank and Glenn Kessler are solid reporters. I don’t know why columnists Nicholas Kristof and Richard Cohen continue to believe that Bush is an honest man, or why Paul Krugman has done more than all of the network and cable “news” operations combined to expose the president as a brazen serial liar. I do know, however, that the current ratio, which I estimate at 100 gullible Woodwards for every competent Krugman, is disastrous for democracy.

What I can explain are five media tendencies that “enable” administration lying and enhance its effectiveness:

• Bestowing unwarranted credibility. When you routinely present a liar as a truth-teller, you become that liar’s accomplice. Viewers — particularly those under the ridiculous impression that network anchors are feisty, fiercely independent and maybe even left-leaning — will place greater credence in an unchallenged lie than a challenged one.

• Demonstrating real or feigned gullibility. The first indicates journalistic incompetence, the second journalistic corruption. Either should be a firing offense, but in our twisted media world it’s a ticket to the top. Self-respecting “news” organizations don’t retain, let alone promote, people such as Bob Woodward and Ted Koppel, or any of the Rumsfeld groupies “covering” the Pentagon.

• Failure to keep a lying score. A number of administration lies have been exposed, though the exposure is brief and often comes weeks after the lie has racked up millions of “frequent liar miles.” A reputable editor, publisher, anchor or producer would be troubled by this and would rectify the situation by regularly publishing or airing a running tally of administration lies.

• Failure to impose a penalty for lying. Why does Bush systematically lie? Because the lies help him to win support for his policies — on economic and other issues as well as Iraq — and the media impose no penalties on those rare occasions they belatedly catch him. Imagine how much robbery we’d have if the only “penalty” for getting caught was a brief mention you were caught. Just as Bush can keep telling the lie, you get to keep the TV or SUV you stole. Not much of a “deterrent.”

• No institutional memory BY DESIGN. In a healthy media environment, experts on the patterns, techniques and history of foreign-policy disinformation campaigns would be valued assets. In our present media environment, such people are shunned and staffers are discouraged from developing their own expertise. TV can hire scores of generals to provide expert analysis, but they won’t hire experienced disinformation exposers Robert Parry, Peter Kornbluh, Norman Solomon, Edward Herman or Noam Chomsky.

The two-faced Washington Post

Bush is a con man who directs his cons at the very people most inclined to trust him: ordinary Americans who’ve been raised and taught by patriotic parents to put their faith and trust in the president of the United States. And here’s the ugliest secret of all: His most bullish media boosters know it!

I speak of the jingoistic, pro-war and exceedingly creepy editorial board of the Washington Post. Commenting on the “misleading” numbers Bush uses to sell to regular folk a tax-cut designed for the rich, the Post editorialized recently, “Mr. Bush must know how phony his ‘averages’ are. Any time a salesman has to resort to such deceptive tactics, the customer ought to be wary about what is being sold” ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38110-2003Feb20?language=printer).

An unsigned editorial represents the collective wisdom of the men and women on the editorial board. It is not the view of a “rogue editorialist” shooting off his mouth. The Post’s editorial braintrust KNOWS that Bush is a grifter.

Non-booster Krugman of the New York Times goes the Post one better, telling Terri Gross, the host of NPR’s “Fresh Air,” that the Bush administration’s “level of irresponsibility and dishonesty is unprecedented” (WMNF-FM, Tampa, Feb. 26).

More and more Americans are beginning to see just how crooked our straight-shooting president is. To further this awareness, and to caution citizens inclined to follow him into war, I review below 23 “techniques of deceit” of Bush and his foreign-policy team. Some of these techniques I address at greater length in “Lying Us Into War” ( http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0302/S00061.htm).

I’ll start with Powell’s techniques before moving on to Bush.

Powell And Bush’s “Techniques Of Deceit”

1) Telling with a straight face the “Mother of All Lies,” so as to lend credence to a bunch of small ones:

“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” That’s what Colin Powell told the U.N., in the course of his now-discredited presentation of bogus tales based on discredited defectors, tortured captives, photos and tape recordings that proved little or nothing, wild speculation, a “fine” British dossier built on plagiarized essays with 12-year-old “revelations,” and so on.

I’ll cite a few specifics below. Readers interested for a damning dissection of each of Powell’s 44 claims can read this analysis ( http://middleeastreference.org.uk/powell030205.html) by Dr. Glen Rangwala of Cambridge University, England’s leading expert on U.S. and U.K. claims about Iraq’s WMD programs.

2) Bait and switch:

As Rangwala noted in his initial analysis ( http://www.traprockpeace.org/firstresponse.html), posted the day after Powell spoke,

“[Powell] makes strong claims about Iraq's retention and development of non-conventional weapons, but the claims that he provides substantive evidence for are either tangential or the evidence is ambiguous. An example would be how Powell claimed: ‘We know that Saddam's son, Qusay, ordered the removal of all prohibited weapons from Saddam's numerous palace complexes ... We also have satellite photos that indicate that banned materials have recently been moved from a number of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction facilities. . . .’

“However, instead of providing proof of any of those claims, Powell instead produced photos of al-Taji ammunition storage facility that shows a small shed and a truck adjacent to the bunker. Powell claimed that these are ‘a signature item’ for chemical bunkers. This seems on the face of it to be a wholly implausible claim: a picture of a truck and a shed by themselves reveal nothing about the contents of the adjacent bunker.

“In summary, Powell didn't provide evidence for the stronger claims that he made, instead displaying a satellite photo that reveals very little. This would indicate that the evidence for the stronger claims is either non-existent or contentious.”

3) Putting incriminating words in Iraqi mouths that you — or at least your State Department — know to be false:

In “Powell's U.N. report apparently contains false information” in the Feb. 24 Sarasota Herald Tribune ( http://www.heraldtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?Date=20030224&Category=COLUMNIST13&ArtNo=302240368&SectionCat=&Template=printart), Gilbert Cranberg, former editorial page editor of the Des Moines Register and George H. Gallup Professor Emeritus at the University of Iowa, notes the following (I quote directly from the author):

He [Powell] also played the tapes, in Arabic, of two intercepted conversations, which the State Department translated. Powell referenced the conversations and commented on them. In the first cited conversation, between two Iraqi military officers discussing how to conceal from U.N. inspectors a certain "modified vehicle," Powell's account of the conversation squared with the State Department's translation. Powell's version of the second conversation, however, departed significantly from it.

This conversation, about possibly forbidden ammunition, was reported by Powell to be between Republican Guard headquarters and an officer in the field. When Powell referred to this conversation, he quoted one of the parties as ostensibly saying, "And we sent you a message yesterday to clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas, the abandoned areas. Make sure there is nothing there."

The State Department's transcript of the actual conversation makes it evident that Powell had embellished the quote to make it appear much more incriminating. Instead of being a directive to "clean out all of the areas, the scrap areas and the abandoned areas," as Powell claimed, the transcript shows the message from headquarters was merely "to INSPECT [emphasis added by Cranberg] the scrap areas and the abandoned areas." The damaging admonition that Powell said he quoted, "Make sure there is nothing there" is not in the transcript and appears to be an invention.

Asked to explain the discrepancy, the State Department's press and public affairs offices said I should study Powell's presentation posted on the department's Web site. Instead of clarifying or explaining the discrepancy, the posted material simply confirmed the disparity.

Cranberg, after pointing out other problems with Powell’s so-called evidence, observed that “columnists at The New York Times and The Washington Post accepted everything Powell said without a smidgen of skepticism, calling it a ‘masterful indictment’ (James Hoagland) ‘that would convince any jury’ (William Safire).”

4) Exploiting an undeserved reputation for integrity to get unsuspecting people to accept flimsy evidence as fact — based on your say-so:

Despite Powell’s boast, most of his “evidence” was reed-thin. For viewers who noticed that, “trust” came into play in a big way. Listen to Richard Cohen, perhaps the most gullible of the Washington Post’s lame, tiny contingent of real and fake liberals:

“The clincher, as it had to be, was not a single satellite photo or the intercept of one Iraqi official talking to another. And it was not, as it never could be, the assertion that some spy or Iraqi deserter had made this or that charge — because, of course, who can prove any of that? It was the totality of the material and the fact that Powell himself had presented it. In this case, the messenger may have been more important than the message.” ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32571-2003Feb5?language=printer )

A week later, as Powell’s “evidence” continued to unravel, the same gullible columnist acknowledged the unraveling but still couldn’t come to grips with the fundamental dishonesty of his hero and the president. Cohen addresses Powell directly:

“Sir, in his kiss-and-not-tell book, David Frum, the former White House speechwriter, tells us about George W. Bush’s insistence on honesty — on refraining from even politically acceptable exaggeration. I accept what he has to say. Yet it’s apparent that when it comes to making the case for war with Iraq, both Bush and his aides have tickled the facts so that everything proves their case. . . . I sleep better knowing that you are in this administration — making policy, I hope, and not propaganda.” ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A397-2003Feb12?language=printer) .

Bush’s “insistence on honesty”? Powell “making policy, . . . not propaganda”? Welcome to the fairy tale world of a respected Washington Post pundit.

5) Withholding the key fact that destroys the moral underpinning of an argument.

Powell condemned Saddam’s “use of mustard and nerve gas against the Kurds in 1988” that killed “Five thousand men, women and children.” True, but he did so with the blessing at the time of many Reaganites who now serve Bush — including Powell. In 1988, “Secretary of State Colin Powell was then the national security adviser who orchestrated Ronald Reagan’s decision to give Hussein a pass for gassing the Kurds,” says former U.S. Ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith in the Boston Globe ( http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/2002/1215/coverstory_entire.htm).

6) Trumpeting the testimony of defectors who you know or highly suspect aren’t credible:

According to the recent Newsweek story “Spies, Lies & Iraq,” ( http://www.msnbc.com/news/867733.asp?0cv=CB20)

“Iraqi defectors who offer themselves to the CIA are put through strenuous interrogations and lie-detector tests. The credible ones are given new identities and homes in America or Germany. The rejects are cast loose to fend for themselves. Some of them are nonetheless embraced by the [Iraqi National Congress] — and, according to CIA officials, recycled to the more sympathetic (and more credulous) hawks in the Pentagon. Their stories are then worked over by Wolfowitz’s special intelligence unit—and passed on to the White House. The CIA, in turn, is asked then to rule on the credibility of information provided by defectors the agency has already deemed to be incredible. . . . Now, unsurprisingly, the CIA has little use for almost any intelligence emanating from the Kurds. The agency has acronyms for various types of intelligence, like HUMINT and ELINT (for electronic intelligence). At Langley, intelligence that is junk is jokingly called KURDINT.”

Powell cynically used KURDINT and other intelligence “junk” for his U.N. “facts” and “conclusions.”

7) Exploiting the fact that the U.N., unlike the U.S. military you served for most of your life, doesn’t have a Code forbidding lying:

Activist Jimmy Walter (walden3.org), who has taken out full-page “Powell Lied?” ads in the New York Times and other publications, reminds Powell what could have befallen him if he had been an active-duty general when he addressed the U.N. Walter cites Section 907, Article 107 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which addresses “False Statements”:

“Any person subject to this chapter who, with intent to deceive, signs any false record, return, regulation, order, or other official document, knowing it to be false, or makes any other false official statement knowing it to be false, shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.”

It’s a good thing Powell is retired. But what about his boss, Commander-in-Chief Bush? Is the man who gives orders to the generals free to lie? Is he as immune from military justice as he appears to be from media justice? We now turn to Bush’s techniques, noting that Powell used some of these as well in his U.N. presentation.

8) Generalized “certitude”:

Bush confidentally asserts that the al Samoud2 missiles, recently ruled by Hans Blix to violate limitations on the distance that Iraqi missiles are allowed to fly, are merely the “tip of the iceberg” of Iraqi’s illegal arsenal. How does he KNOW this? The charitable answer is he doesn’t.

Even Hans Blix doesn’t “know” what, if anything, remains of Iraq’s WMD. As Fairness and Accuracy in Media ( http://www.fair.org/press-releases/iraq-weapons.html) reports, “while Blix said he could not certify [to the U.N.] that all of the proscribed materials Iraq once possessed had been destroyed, neither did he find evidence that any remain. In private, some inspectors do not rule out the possibility that Iraq truly is free of banned weapons [this was prior to Blix’s ruling on the al Samouds]: ‘We haven't found an iota of concealed material yet,’ one unnamed UNMOVIC official told Los Angeles Times Baghdad correspondent Sergei Loiko (12/31/02), who added: ‘The inspector said his colleagues think it possible that Iraq really has eliminated its banned materials.’”

FAIR also cites this analyis of Rolf Ekeus, who headed the UNSCOM inspections from 1992 to 1997: “I would say that we felt that in all areas we have eliminated Iraq's capabilities fundamentally,” he told a May 2000 Harvard seminar (AP, 8/16/00), adding that “there are some question marks left.”

Unless Bush is withholding evidence of Iraqi WMD — evidence that 1441 requires him to provide to inspectors — then he couldn’t know more than Blix. If Bush is in violation of 1441, what would be the appropriate “serious consequences”?

When Blix and Mohammed ElBaradei address the U.N., it’s clear from the tone and substance of their reports that they are honest experts who use words to inform, not to mislead. Being real experts, they’re not ashamed to acknowledge when they can’t make a definitive judgment about a particular matter. When Bush and Powell address the U.N. or the American people, they do so not as honest experts but as shady nonexperts. They pretend to know all, and they use words not to inform but to deceive.

Bush’s certitude is contagious and has infected much of the mass media. My local paper, the putrid St. Petersburg Times, editorialized Feb. 26 that “Bush is correct” in his “iceberg” declaration. Readers will have to trust me on this one, but I GUARANTEE that no one on the SPT editorial board, headed by the dimwitted, uncurious and contemptible Philip Gailey, has a clue as to what remains of Iraqi WMD capabilities.

9) Specific “certitude” — Stating as fact what are allegations, often dubious or subsequently disproved ones.

WMD labs in remote Kurdistan (disproven), mobile WMD labs (unproven, even though inspectors have been searching for years and some are skeptical of the practicality or existence of such labs) — these are just two of many dubious or false charges presented as fact by the Bush team. See Rangwala, my “Lying Us Into War,” and the analyses of the Institute for Public Accuracy at www.accuracy.org for dozens of examples; here I’ll address one.

Bush boldly declares that “From three Iraqi defectors we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs. These are designed to produce germ warfare agents and can be moved from place to a place to evade inspectors. Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He has given no evidence that he has destroyed them.”

What we “know” is that defectors make this unproven claim. We don’t know if they were paid or coached to make the claim, or volunteered it on their own. Rangwala ( http://www.traprockpeace.org/firstresponse.html) notes that one defector made no mention of the labs in his first press conferences. It was several months later, after “debriefings” by the U.S. and the Iraqi National Congress, that he started talking about mobile labs. Hans Blix told the London Guardian ( http://truthout.org/docs_02/020603A.htm) he has seen no evidence that these mobile labs exist. Acting on tips from the U.S. about labs disguised as food-testing trucks, he investigated. “Two food-testing trucks have been inspected and nothing has been found,” he said. Those mobile labs, a propaganga theme pushed hard by the administration because it supports the theme that inspections can never work: A former senior UNSCOM inspector told the Los Angeles Times last September that his inspection teams searched for the labs from 1993 to 1998. “I launched raid after raid,” he said. “We intercepted their radio traffic. We ran roadblocks. We never found anything. It was just speculation.” ( http://www.fourthfreedom.org/php/print.php?hinc=dossier_report.hinc)

Blix, the cautious and honest expert, doesn’t rule out the possiblity that mobile labs exist. But it is absurd for Bush to assert this as an established fact — and the media to allow him to get away with it.

10) Delegated lying/Team lying.

Using disinformation “affiliates,” such as Richard Perle, Ken Adelman and former Clinton administration CIA director James Woolsey, to push damning, highly effective lies for which there is no credible evidence, such as the Saddam-9-11 connection ( http://slate.msn.com/id/2070410/). This way, when the story loses steam and credibility, the president and his top advisers don’t wind up with egg on their faces. The president will have gained considerable public support for an Iraq attack in the months the story percolates, and, quite perversely, his credibility will be enhanced in the “minds” of credulous commentators because he never PERSONALLY pushed this particular lie!

11) Passive lying (doing nothing to prevent what you know to be a vile slander from lodging in the brains of unsuspecting citizens as truth):

a) Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC’s Hardball, made the following important point a few weeks back (click here for transcript: http://www.msnbc.com/news/859673.asp), addressing retired general William Perry Smith:

“According to the [January 2003] Knight Ridder poll . . ., the people that know the most about the situation in Iraq are least supportive of the war. The ones who are most ignorant, particularly those who believe that half the people who attacked us September 11 included Iraqi citizens, are for the war. So isn’t ‘more education’ something that stops support for the war, General? I mean, the president is not winning on the facts. He’s winning, according to the polls, on those who don’t know the facts…. Well, don’t you think the president ought to make the case, General, that the American people, tell the American people, ‘You’re wrong, half of you out there who think that there were Iraqis who attacked us September 11. They weren’t Iraqis. I’ve got some other reason why I want to attack Iraq.’ He’s never said that. Should he? Or should he allow himself to benefit from people’s ignorance?”

Straight-shooting Bush prefers to benefit from the people’s “ignorance,” though “ignorance” is not quite the correct word. People are misinformed because they’ve been deceived by the Prague Connection lie countenanced by Bush and spread by his henchmen.

b) Powell not saying squat about Bush’s repeated declarations that the only purpose for those aluminum tubes Iraq has been trying to buy is to build centrifuges for uranium enrichment. Powell knew there were plenty of doubters in the Energy Department and his own State Department, but the “reluctant warrior” never corrected the president. He allowed Bush to build public and congressional support for war with an outright lie. (If you know there is a valid non-nuclear explanation for a tube, and you tell Americans there is only a nuclear use, that is a lie. For details, see the tubes section in this article of mine: ( http://commondreams.org/views03/0128-08.htm.)

12) The pot calling the kettle black:

See the comment by Rumsfeld at the start of this essay and the steady stream of comments by Bush and others calling Saddam a liar and labeling the Iraqi strategy “cheat and retreat.” Every time Bush or one of his aides correctly calls Saddam a liar (which is not to suggest he tells nothing but lies), reporters should shout back at the speaker, “Takes one to know one!” If reporters shout it in unison, they’ll be less likely to suffer reprisals from the childish thugs who control access to administration officials.

13) The pot calling the WHITE kettle black (dishonest people stating or implying that honest people or an uncorrupted process can’t be trusted):

Administration officials have cast doubt on the integrity of the inspectors and/or the inspection process so as to justify NOT providing them with information with which the inspectors can prove or disprove administration allegations of proscribed weapons or WMD activity.

The Bushies know they can keep an allegation alive and productive so long as it has not been disproven. On several occasions in the recent past, the administration has provided inspectors with evidence of possible nuclear or other proscribed activity at a variety of sites. The inspectors have then visited the sites and found no evidence of such activity — and no evidence that such activity had taken place in any recent time. In most instances inspectors have the technical means to figure this out, so it’s not like Iraq can get wind of the inspection and quickly shut down the operation and remove all the equipment, as well as the evidential residue that would tip off the experts. So now the administration is taking a new tack, claiming that it is withholding evidence because the INSPECTORS can’t be trusted! U.S. officials say the Iraqis have infiltrated and thus corrupted the inspections process. Such charges accomplish two things: (1) They support the argument that inspections can never succeed (as does the probably-bogus claim of mobile weapons labs), which undermines any proposal that features inspections. (2) They undermine the credibility and value of the inspectors in the eyes of people who take administration pronouncements at face value — which encompasses virtually all of the U.S. news media and a large chunk of the citizenry.

14) “Intentional ignorance” as a tactic to sustain an accusation you know or highly suspect is false:

Bush and Powell have built the latest alleged Saddam-al Qaeda connection partly on the activities of an anti-Saddam Islamist group, Ansar-ul-Aslam, based in Kurdish Iraq, which is beyond the control of Saddam’s Baghdad-based government. Among the charges the U.S. has made is that Ansar was operating a chemical and biological weapons lab in its territory. U.S. senators repeatedly asked why the administration doesn’t simply bomb the cite and never got a satisfactory answer. Here’s the REAL answer: Despite what the administration said for public consumption, it was between 99.9 and 100 percent certain that there was no such weapons lab. If they bombed the town and drove the group out, then the media would come in and verify that there was never was any WMD lab. Not only would the allegation no longer be available in the propaganda campaign, but the administration would be proven to be wrong, dishonest or both. After Powell again made the charge at the U.N. on February 5, Ansar invited journalists to their rudimentary headquarters and demonstrated for all to see that there was no WMD lab or the high-tech infrastructure a WMD lab requires. The allegation has been put to rest, though not before it gave weeks of useful service.

15) Passive voice:

Matthew Rothschild, editor of the magazine The Progressive, noted that Bush, in his Feb. 26 speech to the American Enterprise Institute, “repeated his favorite passive phrase, ‘If war is forced upon us.’” As Rothschild aptly comments, “No one’s forcing you, George!” ( http://www.progressive.org/webex/wx0227b03.html)

16) Projecting sincerity that is fraudulent and espousing values you don’t cherish:

Bush excels at making eye contact with the camera or a human and projecting sincerity — whether he believes in what he’s saying or is knowingly selling snake oil. In his Feb. 26 American Enterprise Institute address, Bush spoke about his desire to bring democracy to the Middle East, starting with Iraq. But Bush didn’t take office Feb. 26; he’s been president for 25 months. His government has had substantial leverage over any number of allied regimes in the Middle East, leverage which he could have used to press for democratic reform. To date, he’s shown scant interest. So we’re supposed to believe he’s caught the democracy bug just in time to use it to sell an unpopular war? Last year he welcomed a coup that temporarily displaced the elected president of Venezuela and endorsed crooked elections in Pakistan. He has looked the other way or given the thumbs-up as countless allied governments have exploited 9-11 to crush dissent and tighten the squeeze on democratic foes. In Afghanistan, he promotes rule by warlords. Even before 9-11, Bush was running the U.S. as if it were his own corporation and he was its authoritarian, secretive, scheming and duplicitous CEO. Bush has strong anti-democratic tendencies, the worst of which is his continuous brazen lying. It would be foolish indeed to take at face value his latest sales pitch: war as a means to democratize the Middle East.

17) Talking out of both sides of your mouth:

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), referring to Bush’s reported $26 billion inducement to the Turkish government to disregard the 95 percent of Turks opposed to war and allow Turkish territory to be used as a staging ground, said this: “In the very week that we negotiated with Turkey, the administration also told the governors there wasn’t any more money for education and health care.” http://nytimes.com/2003/03/02/opinion/02DOWD.html

18) Misrepresentation/Invention.

On Sept. 7, 2002, Bush claimed that the International Atomic Energy Agency released a report in 1998 that Saddam was six months away from developing a nuclear weapon. No 1998 IAEA report made any such claim. Then a presidential spokesperson said Bush had referred to a 1991 report. Wrong again. Here’s what the IAEA actually reported in 1998: “There are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance” ( http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020927-500715.htm).

19) Withholding the key fact that would alert viewers that the purported grave threat is non-existent.

Bush said in his October speech that Iraq was developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that could target the United States. The president neglected to tell Americans that Saddam would have to transport these limited-range UAVs — undetected — across the ocean all the way to our coast. The odds of that happening start at a billion to one.

20) Creating in the public mind an intense but unfounded fear:

“Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” (October speech) No nukes, no long-range missiles, no Saddam-delivered “mushroom cloud” over America.

21) Using mistranslation, misquotation and context-stripping to plant a frightening impression that is the exact opposite of what you know to be true:

“Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his ‘nuclear mujahedeen’ -- his nuclear holy warriors” (Bush’s October speech, repeated by Powell).

Here Bush exploits two fears of the public: of Islamist holy-warrior terrorists and nuclear weapons. In “Counter-Dossier II” ( http://traprockpeace.org/weapons.html), Dr. Glen Rangwala, a Cambridge University professor who is the world’s leading authority on U.S. and U.K. claims about the Iraqi regime, observes that the speech Bush is referring to was delivered by Saddam “on 10 September 2000 and was about, in part, nuclear energy. The transcription of the speech was made at the time by the BBC monitoring service. Saddam Hussein actually refers to ‘nuclear energy mujahidin,’ and doesn’t mention the development of weaponry. In addition, the term ‘mujahidin’ is often used in a non-combatant sense, to mean anyone who struggles for a cause. Saddam Hussein, for example, often refers to the mujahidin developing Iraq's medical facilities. There is nothing in the speech to indicate that Iraq is attempting to develop or threaten the use of nuclear weapons.”

22) Straw man:

“The risks of doing nothing, the risks of assuming the best from Saddam Hussein, it’s just not a risk worth taking.” Who advocates “doing nothing”? Not France, Russia and Germany. Not Jimmy Carter ( http://alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=15084). Who?

23) Mixing yourself up with the American people, thus pretending that you and we are one and the same.

“This nation,” says the president, “fights reluctantly, because we know the cost, and we dread the days of mourning that always come.” But Bush also says that because he’s the president, he gets to decide. By no stretch of the imagination is Bush a “reluctant warrior.”

George W. Bush and Colin Powell simply cannot be trusted. Rather than follow such men into an unnecessary and unprovoked war, we’d be better off thinking about just what we should do with this deceitful duo.

©2003 by Dennis Hans

Bio: Dennis Hans is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, National Post (Canada) and online at TomPaine.com, Slate and The Black World Today (tbwt.com), and his media critiques appear regularly at TakeBackTheMedia.com. He has taught courses in mass communications and American foreign policy at the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg, and can be reached at HANS_D@popmail.firn.edu

[Jan 30, 2004] Revisited - The Real Reasons for the Upcoming War in Iraq A Macroeconomic and Geostrategic Analysis of the Unspoken Truth, by William Clark, updated Jan 2004

Although apparently suppressed in the U.S. media, one of the answers to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking. The upcoming war in Iraq war is mostly about how the CIA, the Federal Reserve and the Bush/Cheney administration view hydrocarbons at the geo-strategic level, and the unspoken but overarching macroeconomic threats to the U.S. dollar from the euro. The Real Reasons for this upcoming war is this administration's goal of preventing further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard, and to secure control of Iraq's oil before the onset of Peak Oil (predicted to occur around 2010). However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. This essay will discuss the macroeconomics of the `petrodollar' and the unpublicized but real threat to U.S. economic hegemony from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency. The following is how an individual very well versed in the nuances of macroeconomics alluded to the unspoken truth about this upcoming war with Iraq:

"The Federal Reserve's greatest nightmare is that OPEC will switch its international transactions from a dollar standard to a euro standard. Iraq actually made this switch in Nov. 2000 (when the euro was worth around 82 cents), and has actually made off like a bandit considering the dollar's steady depreciation against the euro. (Note: the dollar declined 17% against the euro in 2002.)

"The real reason the Bush administration wants a puppet government in Iraq -- or more importantly, the reason why the corporate-military-industrial network conglomerate wants a puppet government in Iraq -- is so that it will revert back to a dollar standard and stay that way." (While also hoping to veto any wider OPEC momentum towards the euro, especially from Iran -- the 2nd largest OPEC producer who is actively discussing a switch to euros for its oil exports)."

Although a collective switch by OPEC would be extremely unlikely barring a major panic on the U.S. dollar, it would appear that a gradual transition is quite plausible. Furthermore, despite Saudi Arabia being our `client state,' the Saudi regime appears increasingly weak/threatened from massive civil unrest. Some analysts believe civil unrest might unfold in Saudi Arabia, Iran and other Gulf states in the aftermath of an unpopular U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq [3]. Undoubtedly, the Bush administration is acutely aware of these risks. Hence, the neo-conservative framework entails a large and permanent military presence in the Persian Gulf region in a post-Saddam era, just in case we need to surround and control Saudi's large Ghawar oil fields in the event of a Saudi coup by an anti-western group. But first back to Iraq.

"Saddam sealed his fate when he decided to switch to the euro in late 2000 (and later converted his $10 billion reserve fund at the U.N. to euros) -- at that point, another manufactured Gulf War become inevitable under Bush II. Only the most extreme circumstances could possibly stop that now and I strongly doubt anything can -- short of Saddam getting replaced with a pliant regime.

"Big Picture Perspective: Everything else aside from the reserve currency and the Saudi/Iran oil issues (i.e. domestic political issues and international criticism) is peripheral and of marginal consequence to this administration. Further, the dollar-euro threat is powerful enough that they will rather risk much of the economic backlash in the short-term to stave off the long-term dollar crash of an OPEC transaction standard change from dollars to euros. All of this fits into the broader Great Game that encompasses Russia, India, China."

This information about Iraq's oil currency is not discussed by the U.S. media or the Bush administration as the truth could potentially curtail both investor and consumer confidence, reduce consumer borrowing/spending, create political pressure to form a new energy policy that slowly weans us off Middle-Eastern oil, and of course stop our march towards a war with Iraq. This quasi `state secret' is addressed in a Radio Free Europe article that discussed Saddam's switch for his oil sales from dollars to the euros, to be effective November 6, 2000:

"Baghdad's switch from the dollar to the euro for oil trading is intended to rebuke Washington's hard-line on sanctions and encourage Europeans to challenge it. But the political message will cost Iraq millions in lost revenue. RFE/RL correspondent Charles Recknagel looks at what Baghdad will gain and lose, and the impact of the decision to go with the European currency." [4]

At the time of the switch many analysts were surprised that Saddam was willing to give up approximately $270 million in oil revenue for what appeared to be a political statement. However, contrary to one of the main points of this November 2000 article, the steady depreciation of the dollar versus the euro since late 2001 means that Iraq has profited handsomely from the switch in their reserve and transaction currencies. Indeed, The Observer surprisingly divulged these facts in a recent article entitled: `Iraq nets handsome profit by dumping dollar for euro,' (February 16, 2003).

"A bizarre political statement by Saddam Hussein has earned Iraq a windfall of hundreds of millions of euros. In October 2000 Iraq insisted upon dumping the US Dollar -- `the currency of the enemy' -- for the more multilateral euro." [5]

Although Iraq's oil currency switch appears to be completely censored by the U.S. media conglomerates, this UK article illustrates that the euro has gained almost 25% against the dollar since late 2001, which also applies to the $10 billion in Iraq's U.N. `oil for food' reserve fund that was previously held in dollars has also gained that same percent value since the switch. It was reported in 2003 that Iraq's UN reserve fund had swelled from $10 billion dollars to 26 billion euros. According to a former government analyst, the following scenario would occur if OPEC made an unlikely, but sudden (collective) switch to euros, as opposed to a gradual transition.

"Otherwise, the effect of an OPEC switch to the euro would be that oil-consuming nations would have to flush dollars out of their (central bank) reserve funds and replace these with euros. The dollar would crash anywhere from 20-40% in value and the consequences would be those one could expect from any currency collapse and massive inflation (think Argentina currency crisis, for example). You'd have foreign funds stream out of the U.S. stock markets and dollar denominated assets, there'd surely be a run on the banks much like the 1930s, the current account deficit would become unserviceable, the budget deficit would go into default, and so on. Your basic 3rd world economic crisis scenario.

"The United States economy is intimately tied to the dollar's role as reserve currency. This doesn't mean that the U.S. couldn't function otherwise, but that the transition would have to be gradual to avoid such dislocations (and the ultimate result of this would probably be the U.S. and the E.U. switching roles in the global economy)."

Although the above scenario is unlikely, and most assuredly undesirable, under certain economic conditions it is plausible. In fact, one of the conditions that could create such an environment is a near unilateral U.S. led war in the Middle East. For example, a large spike in oil prices could create huge problems for the imperiled Japanese banking system, the world's largest holder of U.S. dollar reserves. Unfortunately the current Bush administration has chosen a military option instead of a multilateral conference on monetary reform to resolve these issues. In the aftermath of toppling Saddam it is clear the U.S. will keep a large and permanent military force in the Persian Gulf. Indeed, there is no talk of an `exit strategy,' as the military will be needed to protect the newly installed regime, and to send a message to other OPEC producers that they too might receive `regime change' if they convert their oil payments to euros.

Asia Times A poisonous geopolitical jungle By Henry C K Liu

Other articles in this series:
Geopolitics in Iraq an old game
Geopolitical weeds in the cradle of civilization

While post-World War II Iraq remained safely under British imperialist control, in neighboring Iran, Mohammad Mossadegh's democratically-elected nationalist government enacted an oil nationalization bill in 1951. Responding to a British legal challenge in the World Court against Iran and taking it up in the United Nations Security Council, Mossadegh traveled to New York to defend Iran's sovereign right, gaining much support from the world's nations.

US becomes entangled
Then he went to the Netherlands to defend Iran successfully at The Hague, which voted in favor of Iran in its international legal dispute with Britain. On his way home, Mossadegh also paid a visit to Egypt, where he was enthusiastically received as an anti-imperialism hero. Not surprisingly, Mossadegh was toppled a year later by a military coup engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency. The event signaled the emergence of the US as the leading external actor in the Middle East on behalf of neo-imperialism, in effect replacing Britain's traditional imperialist role in the region. Furthermore, the Shah of Iran was now indebted to the US for his throne.

In its January 1952 issue, Time Magazine, hardly a liberal publication and a leader of the anti-communist press, nominated Mohammed Mossadegh as Man of the Year. The Time essay read in part:
 

"There were millions inside and outside of Iran whom Mossadegh symbolized and spoke for, and whose fanatical state of mind he had helped to create. They would rather see their own nations fall apart than continue their present relations with the West. Communism encouraged this state of mind, and stood to profit hugely from it. But communism did not create it. The split between the West and the non-communist East was a peril all its own to world order, quite apart from communism. Through 1951, the communist threat to the world continued; but nothing new was added - and little subtracted. The news of 1951 was this other danger in the Near and Middle East. In the center of that spreading web of news was Mohammed Mossadegh. The West's military strength to resist communism grew in 1951. But Mossadegh's challenge could not be met by force. For all its power, the West in 1951 failed to cope with a weeping, fainting leader of a helpless country; the West had not yet developed the moral muscle to define its own goals and responsibilities in the Middle East. Until the West did develop that moral muscle, it had no chance with the millions represented by Mossadegh. In Iran, in Egypt, in a dozen other countries, when people asked: 'Who are you? What are you doing here?' The East would be in turmoil until the West achieved enough moral clarity to construct a just and fruitful policy toward the East."

As Time saw it, communism was producing a dual effect. It fanned anti-imperialism in the colonies while it created pressure in the West to placate Third World nationalism to keep it from going communist. On March 8, 1951, the day after Ali Razmara, Iran's pro-Western premier, was assassinated, Mossadegh submitted to the Iranian majlis (parliament) his proposal to nationalize Iran's oil. Within weeks, a popular wave of anti-imperialist sentiment swept him into the premiership. The British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Co had been paying Iran much less than it did the British government. Ayatollah Abol-Ghasem Kashani, a leading Shi'ite fundamentalist cleric who had been fighting the infidel British in Iraq and Iran, played a key role in the nationalization of oil in Iran. His followers had assassinated Razmara.

The Iranian crisis inspired Egypt, which followed with an announcement that it was abrogating its 1936 unequal treaty with Britain. The Egyptian government demanded the withdrawal of British troops from Egyptian soil and an end to British occupation of the Suez Canal. When Britain refused, Egypt exploded with anti-British riots, hoping that the US, which had opposed British use of force in Iran, would take the same line in Egypt. The Times essay reported that "the US, however, backed the British, and the troops stayed. But now they could only stay in Egypt as an armed occupation of enemy territory. Throughout the East, that kind of occupation may soon cost more than it is worth."

The Time essay went on: 

"The word 'American' no longer has a good sound in that part of the world. To catch the Jewish vote in the US, president Harry S Truman in 1946 demanded that the British admit 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine, in violation of British promises to the Arabs. Since then, the Arab nations surrounding Israel have regarded that state as a US creation, and the US, therefore, as an enemy. The Israeli-Arab war created nearly a million Arab refugees, who have been huddled for three years in wretched camps. These refugees, for whom neither the US nor Israel would assume the slightest responsibility, keep alive the hatred of US perfidy. No enmity for the Arabs, no selfish national design motivated the clumsy US support of Israel. The American crime was not to help the Jews, but to help them at the expense of the Arabs. Today, the Arab world fears and expects a further Israeli expansion. The Arabs are well aware that Alben Barkley, vice president of the US, tours his country making speeches for the half-billion-dollar Israeli bond issue, the largest ever offered to the US public. Nobody, they note bitterly, is raising that kind of money for them."

As the Time essay warned, winning the hearts and minds of the Arabs away from communism was made hopelessly difficult by US policy on Israel. As a pro-Republican publication, the position taken by Time was not exactly bipartisan, as the Jewish vote at the time was predominantly Democratic. Still, the warning was prescient. In pro-West Iraq, both Shi'ites and Kurds sought political influence through the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) as well as the Ba'ath Socialist Party in its early stage as a dissident organization after World War II. Between 1949 and 1955, Kurds and Shi'ites comprised 31.3% and 46.9%, respectively, of the central committee membership in the ICP. This explained partly why the US was less than sympathetic to Shi'ite and Kurdish separatist aspirations all through the Cold War. US hostility toward Iraqi Shi'ites would escalate after the Shi'ite Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Today, despite the claim of aiming to spread democracy in the Middle East, geopolitics will not permit US-occupied Iraq to accept the democratic principle of majority rule that will give political control to the Shi'ite majority.

By 1954, political instability continued in pro-West Iraq as the US tried to substitute fast-waning British dominance by creating the Baghdad Pact which was formed on February 4, 1955 as part of the US global collective security system to prevent Soviet expansion into the Middle East. Members of the pact included Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Shah-ruled Iran and Britain, with the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) participating. It was hoped that Syria and Jordan would also join to complete the anti-communist arc of pro-West countries in the region. A single voice of resistance came from Egypt. Rising Arab nationalism and popular opposition to imperialism in the entire region, ignited by regular passionate broadcasts of Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser, caused Syria to reject the Baghdad Pact. Even the young anglophile King Hussein of Jordan, who later would transform into a US puppet, had to bow to the will of his people when they took to the streets in large numbers to denounce the pact.

An anti-communist pact is born
The Baghdad Pact, known also as the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) or the Middle East Treaty Organization (METO), was one of the least effective Cold War security alliances created by the US. Modeled after NATO, CENTO aimed at containing Soviet expansion by creating a defensive line of anti-communist states along the southwestern frontier of the USSR. The Middle East and South and Southeast Asia were politically volatile regions during the 1960s with the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, the North-South Korea confrontation and the Indo-Pakistan wars. The US, with its main geopolitical aim of containing communist expansion, tried to befriend all warring parties in both regions to prevent any tilt toward the Soviet Union. Members of CENTO, an anti-communist treaty organization, saw no compelling purpose to get directly involved in either the Arab-Israel or the Indo-Pakistan dispute, where communist infiltration was not obvious. In 1965 and again in 1971, Pakistan tried unsuccessfully to get assistance through CENTO in its wars with India. The Baghdad Pact trapped the US into supporting corrupt, unpopular and undemocratic regimes in Iraq, Iran and Pakistan. US support for Israel was an insurmountable obstacle to the development of improved relations between the US and Arab nations, including members of CENTO. More importantly, the alliance did little to prevent the expansion of Soviet influence in the area. Non-member states in the Middle East, feeling threatened by CENTO, turned to the Soviets, especially Egypt and Syria, even though they remained hostile to communism domestically. The pact lasted nominally until the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Egypt recognized the People's Republic of China in 1956, becoming the first Arab and African nation to establish official diplomatic relations with the communist country that the US had placed on the top of its forbidden list. Egypt's decision on China defied US policy of containment of new China through diplomatic isolation. As a penalty, the US withdrew on July 19, 1956, its loan offer to finance the Aswan High Dam, and Britain and the World Bank followed suit immediately. In response, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal on July 26, 1956. The Soviet Union then offered an aid program to Egypt, including a loan to finance the Aswan High Dam.

Crisis over the Suez
Anthony Eden, then British prime minister, characterized the Egyptian nationalization of the canal as "theft", and US secretary of state John Forster Dulles declared that Nasser would have to be made to "disgorge" it. The French and British depended critically on the canal for transporting oil, and they felt that Nasser had become a symbol of nationalist threat to their remaining interests in the Middle East and Africa. Eden wanted to launch a military response immediately, but the British military was not ready. Both France and Britain froze Egyptian assets within their jurisdictions and prepared for war in earnest. Egypt promised to compensate the stockholders of the Suez Canal Company and to guarantee right of canal access to all ships, making it difficult for France and Britain to rally international support to regain the canal by force. The Soviet Union, the East European bloc and non-aligned Third World countries generally supported Egypt's struggle with imperialism. President Dwight D Eisenhower distanced the US from British positions and stated that while the US opposed the nationalization of the canal, it was against any use of force. Britain, France and Israel then united secretly in what was to become known as the tripartite collusion. Israel opted to participate in the Anglo-French plans against Egypt to impress the imperialist West that the Jewish state could play a useful geopolitical role against Arab nationalism.

Secret arrangements were made for Israel to make the initial invasion of Egypt and overtake one side of the Suez Canal. The British and French attempted to follow the Israeli invasion with high-pressure diplomacy, but being unsuccessful, sent troops to occupy the canal. However, the action on the part of the tripartite collusion was not viewed with favor by the US or the USSR since military intervention to enhance isolated national interests challenged a world order of superpower geopolitical predominance in the region. Regional conflicts must not be allowed to conflict with the geopolitical pattern of superpower competition for the hearts and minds of the unaligned.

Responding to superpower pressure, the tripartite troops were withdrawn from the Canal Zone in December under the direction of the United Nations. A United Nations Emergency Force was then stationed in the Gaza Strip and at Sharm el-Sheikh and on the Sinai border in December 1956 and stayed for more that a decade until the Six-Day War of 1967. Egypt kept the canal and reparations were paid by Egypt under the supervision of the World Bank. Overall, the actions of the tripartite collusion were not considered beneficial to the campaign to spread democracy in the Cold War context because they pushed Nasser and Egypt further towards the USSR. The war over the canal also laid the groundwork for the Six-Day War in 1967 due to a lack of a peace settlement following the 1956 war, in which Egypt suffered a military defeat but scored a political victory.

Britain's disastrous behavior in the Suez crisis of 1956 exposed its thinly-disguised, last-gasp imperialist fixation disguised as anti-communism. Israel, led by David Ben-Gurion's hawkish faction with a pro-West, militant confrontational policy, with Golda Meir replacing the moderate Moshe Sharett as foreign minister, invaded Egypt on October 29, 1956. Sharett's policies with regard to neighboring Arab states were characterized by vision and pragmatism, but this form of diplomacy was never given a chance by the hardliners, who were mostly fixated in the belief that "Arabs respect only the language of force", as Winston Churchill had said about the Russians. Sharett, albeit an ardent Zionist, attempted to develop policies based on constructive engagement, rather than belligerence and dehumanization, with neighboring Arab states. Sharett believed that Israel could have a special role to play in the developing nations of the world, including the Arab countries. Sharett was among the few in the Middle East who recognized that terror and counter-terror between Palestinians and Israelis would lead to an endless cycle of violence, which if not controlled by enlightened political leadership, would become a way of life that would eventually destroy both peoples. His political and diplomatic wisdom was always portrayed by the Israeli mainstream as "weak and cowardly".

By contrast, Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall" doctrine of Zionism that sought to expel the Arabs of Palestine by force has dominated the Israeli political scene to this day. Jabotinsky viewed Zionism as a colonial enterprise, in the same vein as British colonization of America or Australia, with Arabs as Native Americans or Australian Aborigines. Israel was to accomplish with militant Zionism what British imperialism, weakened by what Zionists viewed as the British disease of liberalism, failed to accomplish in the Middle East, which is to totally and permanently emasculate a once-proud Arab nation.

While the US opposed Anglo-French military intervention to undo Egyptian nationalization of the Suez Canal, US military strategy in the region was made explicit on January 5, 1957 by a presidential message to Congress known as the Eisenhower Doctrine, to provide military assistance to countries in the region, include the employment of US armed forces, to oppose international communism. Israel saw anti-communism in the Middle East as God's gift to the new Jewish nation on Arab land and became a fervent supporter of the Eisenhower Doctrine, with wholesale marginalization of the Israeli left and moderates in Israeli politics. Instead of moving in the direction of the Switzerland model, as a neutral oasis in a sea of rising Arabic nationalism against "divide and rule" imperialism, contributing to the development of the region for the benefit of all, Israel presented itself as an outpost of European imperialism and US neo-imperialism, setting itself up as a hostile garrison state in a region where Jews are outnumbered by 50 to one.

Unless Israeli policy changes with a new self image and political destiny, its continued existence as a hostile nation among Arabs is not sustainable any more than neo-imperialism is sustainable in the Third World. Throughout history, the Jews have contributed greatly to the prosperity of their various adopted countries. There is no reason why they cannot do so in the Middle East, their ancestral home, except for a short-sighted, more-than-clever-by-half posture of catering to Western imperialism by claiming to be the sole European democracy in the Middle East that deserves US support. If Israel wants to stay in the Middle East, there is no escaping the need to be a genuine Middle East nation, throwing its lot in with those of other Middle East nations, rather than setting itself apart as a European transplant.

King al-Shareif al-Hussein of Saudi Arabia lived for a tribal dream of ruling Syria. According to some historians, such as Avi Shlaim and Simha Falpan, the dream for a Hashmite-controlled Great Syria was an obsession for both father and son. When this dream proved elusive, his son, King Abdullah, sought alliance with the Zionist movement to achieve his father's dream. This tribal dream was exploited by the Zionist leadership to drive a wedge between the neighboring Arab states. Ironically, the Arab countries whose armies entered Palestine on May 15, 1948 did so partly to keep King Abdullah from gaining control of the Palestinian portion of Palestine, which had been allotted to Palestinian Arabs by UN General Assembly Resolution 181. According to historian Falpan, during a meeting with King Abdullah at Shunah, Jordan, which took place soon after Husni al-Zaim's coup in Syria, Moshe Sharett wrote in the spring of 1949 that the king told him that "the idea of Great Syria ... [is] one of the principles of the Arab revolt that I have been serving all my life."

Falpan also wrote that the tactic of misleading Abdullah with Syria was strongly endorsed by Yigal Yadin, the Israeli chief of staff. In a consultation between the Israeli Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defense on April 12, 1949, Yidin reported: "Abdullah is more interested in Great Syria than in Palestine. This is in his blood, this is his political and military outlook and he is ready to sell out all the Palestinians in this aim. We have to know how to play this card to achieve our aim ... We should not support the plan of Great Syria but we should divert Abdullah toward this plan." This kind of tactical geopolitical scheming cannot overcome the strategic geopolitical blunder of an Israel denying the need to come to terms with the realization that for Israel to survive, it needs to accept the reality that it must become a bona fide Middle East nation, not an extension of New York, and that its acceptance by Arabs rests on its developing a genuine posture of fraternal friendship, not hostile opportunistic geopolitical calculations.

Israel's independence
On May 15, 1948, the Israel war of independence officially began with the declaration of Israel as a Jewish state simultaneously with British withdrawal from Palestine. But Israeli military action started a month earlier. As the British prepared to evacuate, the Israelis invaded and occupied most of the Arab cities in Palestine in the spring of 1948 to fill a military vacuum. Tiberias was occupied on April 19, Haifa on April 22, Jaffa on April 28, the Arab quarters in the New City of Jerusalem on April 30, Beisan on May 8, Safad on May 10 and Acre on May 14. Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, admitted that every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs, a deliberate policy to induce Arabs to flee Palestine en mass. The massacre at Deir Yassin on April 9, committed by commandos of the Irgun headed by Menachem Begin, was part of that policy. Begin wrote: "Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of 'Irgun butchery', were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. This mass flight soon developed into a maddened, uncontrollable stampede. The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated." The propaganda campaign of Deir Yassin to induce panic on Arabs was so effective that the incident became embarrassingly detrimental to Israel's international image; so much so that Israeli historians have since felt compelled to deny if not the facts, at least the policy intent, blaming the massacre on the nature of war.

Egypt, Syria and Jordan, newly independent and still weak from century-long colonial oppression, formed an ill-equipped, ill-trained and ill-led coalition army of 20,000 to move into Palestine on the side of the Palestinians against Israel's 60,000 well-equipped, seasoned and well-led troops fresh from fighting under British command in World War II. The bloody war lasted a year until April 3, 1949 when Israel and the Arab states agreed to an armistice. Israel gained about 50% more territory than was originally allotted to it by the UN partition plan. The war created over 780,000 Palestinian refugees who were forcefully evicted from Jewish-held areas. Gaza fell under the jurisdiction of Egypt. The West Bank of Jordan was occupied by Jordan and later annexed, consistent with secret agreements made with the Zionist leadership prior to the initiation of hostilities.

Bloody end to monarchy in Iraq
In post-World War II Iraq, Nuri Said, 14 times prime minister who always took orders dutifully from his masters in London, having come down hard on Iraqi nationalists, kept Iraq from active opposition to the creation of Israel and hitched Iraq to the 1955 Baghdad Pact, a US instigated anti-communist security agreement binding Iraq to Britain, Turkey, Shah-ruled Iran and Pakistan, finally signed his own political death warrant and that of the puppet monarchy he served by supporting the 1956 Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt. Reactionary pan-Arabism took a step forward under British guidance in 1958 when on February 12, a pro-West federation between Jordan and Iraq, called the Arab Union of Jordan and Iraq, was formed with a common premier. Within five months, on July 14, 1958, a successful military coup by the Free Officers led by General Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew the Said government. The three main components in the Iraqi army, Nasirrites, communists and Ba'athists, united and dethroned the puppet king, executed all members of the royal family for treason and even denied them of Islamic burial rites for sins against the holy. Nuri Said himself was caught two days later, trying to escape from Baghdad dressed as a woman, by a mob which tore him apart with their bare hands and left his mutilated body to be flattened by passing vehicular traffic. Collaborators with the West were cut into pieces and "burnt like lambs". Public statues of the treasonous monarch were torn down in street demonstrations so large in numbers and so euphoric in passion that the new Revolutionary Council had to proclaim a curfew to keep order. Based on that history, neither the current US-installed President Ghazi al-Yawir, a Sunni Muslim tribal chief, nor his US-appointed prime minister, Iyad Allawi, a long-time US operative, nor other members of the US-appointed interim Iraqi government, has any reason to sleep well. Already, several ministers of the Allawi cabinet have failed to physically survive their interim political appointments.

The Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party of Iraq and the Communist Party of Iraq (CPI) were the two major political parties in post-World War II Iraq. The two parties initially shared some characteristics, but irreconcilable ideological rivalry soon developed due to contradiction between egalitarian communism and hierarchical tribal culture and the internationalist support to the CPI provided by a non-Arab foreign power in the form of the Soviet Union, within the context of USSR state interests. The state-to-state relationship between Ba'athist Iraq and the USSR based on geopolitics affected the domestic strategy of the CPI and vice versa. The growing ranks of the Ba'athists were upset by communist internationalist criticism of Arab nationalism, which prioritizes Arab unity and the power politics aspirations of the Arab nation over universal social justice.

A new government of Iraq was proclaimed by General Abd-al-Karim Qasim on July 15, 1958 and the pro-West Arab Union with Jordan was immediately declared dissolved. Iraq then worked for close relations with the United Arab Republic, which had been established by a union of Egypt and Syria earlier that year. As events developed, the Ba'ath Party in Syria was forced to dissolve in 1958. In 1959, Iraq formally withdrew from the Baghdad Pact. A year later, Iraq again made claims on Kuwait as an integral part of its Basra province, while Kuwait formally received its independence as a separate nation from Britain. On June 25, 1961, Qasim officially called for "the return of Kuwait to the Iraqi homeland". In September, Qasim rejected efforts to establish political autonomy for Kurds in northern Iraq and launched a major military campaign against Kurdish separatists. These issues of Kuwait recovery and Kurdish separatism predated the Saddam Hussein government by three decades, hardly credible pretexts for Bush's war for regime change in Iraq.

In time, a power struggle ensued between Iraqi communists and the US-backed Ba'athist faction under Qasim, who had bought Western support for his government by not interfering with the Western control of Iraq's oil production. Qasim had tolerated Iraqi communists as a force against the Ba'athists in his government. Soon, the Ba'athists began to receive backing from US anti-communist policy. To retain US support, Qasim turned on the Iraqi communists. During the turmoil, communist casualties suffered from the US-trained Iraqi government internal security forces numbered over 5,000. An attempted anti-communist coup against Qasim was nevertheless launched on March 8, 1959 by Ba'athist Colonel Abd al-Wahhab al-Shawwaf. Backed by conservative units of the army, Shawwaf alleged that the Qasim government was dominated by communists. The coup failed. In October 1959, the Ba'athists led by al-Shawwaf made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Qasim. Saddam Hussein, who would become president in 1979, was a member of the assassination squad. After having been shot in the unsuccessful coup attempt, Saddam fled to Syria, then to Egypt, where he studied law at Cairo University. The Iraqi Ba'athists and the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) shared a common interest in getting rid of the Soviet-tilting Qasim.

On February 8, 1963, the Qasim government was overthrown, with the help of the CIA, by a group of young officers who were sympathizers though not members of the Ba'ath Party. Qasim himself was executed by firing squad the following day. Two days later, on February 11, the US recognized the new Ba'athist government on the basis of its anti-communism.

Author Said K Aburish (Saddam Hussein: The Politics of Revenge) who worked with Saddam in the 1970s, claimed that the CIA's role in the coup against Qasim was "substantial". CIA agents were in touch with army officers who helped in the coup, operated an electronic command center in Kuwait to guide the anti-Qasim forces, and supplied the conspirators with lists of people to be killed to paralyze the government. The coup plotters repaid the CIA with access to Soviet-made jets and tanks the US military was keen on acquiring.

The Ba'athists, never having ruled any country, lacked experience in 1963 in managing the government apparatus left by British colonial rule. They focused their energy instead on eliminating communists in public office. Since many professionals and public administrators were leftists, the anti-communist campaign rendered the government inoperative. The Ba'athist government fell in November 1963 after only nine months in office, having been unable to end violent political feuding that spilled over onto the streets that in no small way was stirred up by CIA covert action, but not before another 3,000 leftists were killed, as reported in John K Cooley's The Shifting Sands of Arab Communism. Not a single word from Western human-rights groups about these mass killings, let alone the US State Department or the White House, which four decades later listed the Iraqi gas attack on Kurdish villagers among its list of pretexts to invade Iraq. The double standard was based entirely on geopolitics. The collapsed Ba'athist government was succeeded by a pro-West government of right-wing technocrats, with CIA help.

Abd al-Salam Arif, a colonel at the time of the 1958 coup, and a rival of Qasim, became the new president, and he took steps to exclude Ba'athists from his government and brought in Nasirrite nationalists, which immediately put him on the wrong side of the US. On April 13, 1966, Arif was killed in a helicopter crash of unknown causes, and was replaced by his brother, Abd al-Rahman Arif. Iraqi relations with Western powers worsened following the Six Day War which began on June 5, 1967. Iraq gave token assistance to the frontline Arab states in the Six-Day War with Israel. Believing as most in the Arab world did that the US provided direct military support to Israel during the Six-Day War, Iraq broke diplomatic relations with Washington in protest.

On July 17, 1968, a Ba'athist coup ousted Abd al-Rahman Arif. General Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr became president and Saddam Hussein was named vice president. By 1968, Saddam had moved up the Ba'ath Party ranks and wiped out the last pockets of communist resistance in the south and north. With the domestic threat from communists under control, Iraq improved relations with the Soviet Union as geopolitical leverage against the West. As a matter of policy throughout its history, the Communist Party of the USSR repeatedly sacrificed its sister parties in other countries to enhance the geopolitical interests of the USSR as a state, consistent with Josef Stalin's policy of socialism in one country. Global communism as an extremist movement directed from Moscow was mostly a figment of US paranoid imagination.

Ba'athist ideology takes root
Since 1968, Iraqi politics has been a one-party system dominated by the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party of Iraq. Ba'athist ideology combines elements of Arab nationalism, anti-imperialism and tribal socialism. Its slogan is "Unity, Freedom, Socialism" - unity among Arabs, freedom from Western imperialism and socialism with Arabic characteristics. Prior to 1958, Ba'athist parties in many Arab countries were dissident political organizations struggling for recognition and popular support. Members were imprisoned by many host governments and party organs were driven underground. The Iraqi Ba'ath Party operated clandestinely against the pro-West Iraqi government while it competed for followers with the Iraqi Communist Party. This background shaped the characteristic and culture of the party. Tariq Aziz, top ranking Ba'athist and vice president of Iraq in charge of foreign relations, wrote in 1980 on the party's clandestine revolutionary heritage: "The Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party is not a conventional political organization, but is composed of cells of valiant revolutionaries ... They are experts in secret organization. They are organizers of demonstrations, strikes and armed revolutions."

The decision by the US occupation authorities to marginalize the Ba'ath Party from Iraqi politics after the last year's invasion was a strategic as well as a tactical error, for not only was it strategically counterproductive to destroy the only secular political organization against Islamic fundamental extremism, it was also tactically foolish because the Ba'athist cells have been trained to go underground to easily survive official persecution to create insurmountable problems for the US-imposed governing authority.

The record of governance of the Iraqi Ba'ath government had been undeniably impressive. The secularization policies gave rise to an intellectual elite, including many female professionals in all fields. "Teaching the woman means teaching the family," was a battle cry. Literacy was increased dramatically with free universal education. Party slogans such as "Knowledge is light, ignorance darkness", and "The campaign for literary is a holy jihad", were promoted. The Iraqi Ba'ath Party was a political organization of clandestinity and ubiquity. Iraqi Ba'athists throughout its history might deviate from strict interpretation of Ba'athist ideology of Arab unity, freedom from foreign domination and tribal socialism, yet Ba'athist doctrine generally set guidelines for Iraqi policy formulation, such as geopolitical non-alignment, pan-Arabism and domestic accommodation with diverse religious and ethnic groups. Iraqi Ba'athist policies, as distinct from Ba'athism in the Arab world in general, were directed toward specific Iraqi needs and problems, keeping Iraq from extreme pan-Arabism.

In 1970, after decades of unrest, the Iraqi government, barely two years under Ba'ath leadership, agreed to form an autonomous Kurdish region, letting Kurds into the cabinet. In 1971, borders with Jordan were closed as a protest to Jordan's attempt to curb the Palestinian Liberation Organization. In 1972, Bakr nationalized Iraq's oil industry. US, British and Dutch oil corporations lost their holdings, including the 25% share of the Iraq Petroleum Company that had been owned by US-based Exxon and Mobil. The Soviet Union, and later France, provided technical aid and capital to Iraq's oil industry. In April 1972, in response to rising US hostility, Iraq signed a 15-year friendship pact with the Soviet Union and agreed to cooperate in political, economic and military affairs. The Soviets supplied Iraq with arms.

During the late 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, a rapprochement between the Iraqi communists and the Ba'athists came about from the Iraqi government's increasing reliance on the USSR in the face of domestic and foreign pressures. With US urging, the Shah of Iran claimed the Shatt al-Arab waterway in 1969 and seized three strategic islands in the Arabian Gulf in 1971, reducing Iraq to a landlocked position. Kurdish guerrilla and terrorist activities in northern Iraq were sponsored by Iran and the US. British/US hostility over Iraqi nationalization of the Iraqi Petroleum Company in 1972 and to Iraq's role in the 1973 Arab War with Israel forced Iraq to tilt further towards the USSR. Clashes between government forces and Kurdish separatist groups began in March 1974 only after the Kurds received military aid from the US through Shah-ruled Iran. In 1975, a settlement of border disputes was reached with Iran to stop inciting and aiding Kurdish separatists.

Central to Saddam's vision had always been to unite the Arab world. When Egyptian president Anwar Sadat broke ranks with Arab solidarity by signing the 1978 treaty with Israel, Saddam saw it as an opportunity for Iraq to play a leading role in pan-Arab affairs. He was instrumental in convening an Arab summit in Baghdad that denounced Sadat's betrayal of Arab solidarity through a separate political reconciliation with Israel. The summit imposed economic sanctions on Egypt that lacked effectiveness due to Arab disunity. On June 16, 1979, Bakr was stripped of all positions and put under house arrest. Saddam became the new president, followed by a massive purge within the Ba'ath Party.

While outsiders were not privy to the real causes of Iraqi political developments, one factor was a split over a proposed union with Syria, where Regional Ba'athists predominated. Saddam gained control of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party with an adherence to pan-Arabism. National elections were held on June 20, 1980. An analysis by Amazia Baram, "The June 1980 Elections to the National Assembly in Iraq: An Experiment in Controlled Democracy", in Orient (September 1981) shows that 75% of those elected were Ba'athists, 7% women, over 50% with higher education, 40% Shi'ites and 12% Kurds. Democracy had come to Iraq two decades before the 2002 Iraqi War to spread democracy in the Middle East.

Revolution in Iran, a hostage crisis and a war
Early in 1979, the Islamic revolution in Iran took place that was to have serious geopolitical consequences for Iraq. Strong Shi'ite fundamentalist opposition against the Shah in Iran accelerated in the late 1970s as the country came close to civil war. The opposition was lead by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who lived in exile in Iraq and later in France. On January 16, 1979, the unpopular Shah was forced to flee Iran. Shapour Bakhtiar, a liberal, as new prime minister with the help of the Supreme Army Council, could not control the agitated country overflowing with theocratic activism. Khomeini returned to an Iran engulfed with religious passion on the first day of February in 1979. Ten days later, Bakhtiar went into hiding, eventually to find exile in Paris. On April 1, after a landslide victory in a national referendum on an Islamic Republic for Iran, Khomeini declared an Islamic republic with a new constitution reflecting the ideals of Islamic government. To the chagrin of US propagandists, democracy reflective of the will of the people again turned anti-US. Khomeini became supreme spiritual leader (valy-e-faqih) of Iran.

On November 4, 1979, Islamic students stormed the US Embassy, taking 66 people, the majority US citizens, as hostages. It was an event that dealt a fatal blow to the re-election efforts of president Jimmy Carter and contributed to the election of Ronald Reagan, with historic consequences to US domestic politics and foreign policy, turning the US decidedly to the extreme right. For Saddam, the Iranian revolution made him an instant darling of Washington.

Unrest among Kurds in northern Iraq intensified, inspired by unrest following the events in Iran, taking advantage of the Iraqi government's preoccupation with renewed religious animosities between Shi'ites and Sunnis in southern Iraq linked to the rise of Shi'ite fundamentalism in Iran. Relations between the two neighboring countries, never good, deteriorated rapidly. On September 17, 1980, the agreement on Iraqi/Iranian borders from 1975 was declared null and void by Iraq, which claimed the whole Shatt el-Arab, a small, but important and rich area. Iraq claimed territories inhabited by Arabs (the southwestern oil-producing province of Iran called Khouzestan), as well as Iraq's right over Shatt el-Arab, which the Iranians call Arvandroud.

When Iranian students took the hostages at the US Embassy, it was at first not at all clear whom they represented or what they hoped to achieve. In fact, a similar mob had briefly done the same thing nine months earlier, holding the US ambassador hostage for a few hours before Khomeini ordered him released. But this time Khomeini, in response to persistent US hostility, saw political utility in this potent symbol, and issued a statement in support of the action against the US "den of spies". The students vowed not to release the hostages until the US returned the Shah to Iran for trial, along with the billions he had stolen from the Iranian people and kept in overseas banks.

Taking on the safe return of the hostages as his personal responsibility, Carter, a committed born-again Christian, tried to pursue a peaceful resolution by gradually building pressure on Iran through economic sanctions. He ordered an embargo on Iranian oil export on November 11. Rejecting the option of immediate military action recommended by his hawkish national security advisor Zbigniew Brezezinski, as too risky to the lives of the hostages, Carter escalated tensions by freezing Iranian assets in the US. While secretary of state Cyrus Vance led official diplomatic efforts, Hamilton Jordan, Carter's chief of staff, spent thousands of hours working secret channels at the disposal of the office of the president to end the crisis. For the first few months, the US public rallied around Carter, who had clearly made freeing the hostages his top priority. As fall turned into winter and then spring, and negotiations failed to produce a deal or even any visible signs of resolution, frustrated US public opinion demanded stronger action. Time was turning against Carter's non-military approach.

Finally, with the Iranians showing no signs of ever releasing all the hostages, Carter, desperate, approved a high-risk rescue operation on April 11, 1980 designated as "Desert One" that had been under contingency planning for months. Despite the fact that the odds against its success were forbiddingly high, Carter ordered the mission and was disappointed when he received reports that the rescue mission by Delta Force, code named Eagle Claw, had had to be aborted in midstream due to three of the six deployed helicopters malfunctioning under desert conditions. During the withdrawal, another helicopter crashed into a C-130 transport plane while taking off, killing eight elite commando servicemen and wounding three more, without ever engaging Iranian opposition fire.

The next morning, gleeful Iranians broadcast to the whole world live footages of the smoking remains of the failed US rescue mission on Iraqi soil, a stark symbol of superpower impotence, if not incompetence. Having opposed Desert One from the start, Vance, who had been kept out of the rescue loop, resigned in protest out of principle.

Finally, in September, with the Iran-Iraq war in full steam in favor of Iraq, Khomeini's government decided it was time to end the hostage matter. Despite rumors that Carter might pull an "October Surprise", a term coined by Republican vice presidential candidate George H W Bush, to get the hostages home before election day, negotiations dragged on for months, even after Reagan's landslide victory on the first Tuesday of November.

The rumored "October Surprise" might have been the US hope that Saddam would act as a US proxy to punish Iran and topple Khomeini with a quick victory before the US election. Believing Iran to be too weak both politically and militarily to resist, and emboldened by the certainty that US weapon systems afforded to the Shah of Iran had been drastically degraded under Khomeini, Iraq launched a full-scale invasion of Iran on September 22, 1980 with quiet encouragement from the US less than two month before the US presidential election, in which Carter's failure to bring the crisis of US hostages held by Iran to a satisfactory close had become a key election issue. Iraq won some initial battles, but a supposedly weak Iranian military managed to achieve surprising defensive successes and halted Iraqi advance by October, despite US help to Iraq in providing classified information on US weapon systems delivered to Iran during the Shah era. While the start of the Iran-Iraq War did not rescue Carter from election defeat, it did force Iran to start negotiating to end the hostage crisis.

An extraordinary story was filed a decade later in the April 15, 1991 New York Times by Gary Sick, Carter's national security council staff responsible for Iran, detailing a three-way bidding contest for the release of the hostages between Iran and a clueless Carter administration, and the Reagan campaign headed by William Casey (who was to become Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director later under Reagan) through arms dealer/CIA operative Jamshid Hashemi, who had close contacts in Iranian revolutionary circles. The Reagan campaign was dealing with Iranian operatives to ensure that no deal would be reached before the US election, lest Carter should gain political advantage from a pre-election hostage release. The Reagan people were topping escalating offers made to Iran by the Carter people to induce the Iranians to hold off any deal with Carter. After long negotiations in which Reagan forces agreed to unfreeze Iranian assets, transfer money, as well as military equipment to Iran for the release of US hostages, should their man win the election, the hostages in the US Embassy were released on the inauguration of a victorious Reagan on January 20, 1981. The Reagan victory was partly paid for by the US hostages having their freedom delayed for months. The principle of "the foreign enemy of my domestic opponent is my ally" entered US politics.

The Iran-Iraq War would go on for most of the decade for its own geopolitical reasons, with the US tilting quietly towards Iraq. Still, the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to a hostile Iran all through its bloody war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988, and diverted the proceeds to the Contra rebels fighting to overthrow the democratically-elected leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. The arms sales had a dual goal: appeasing a hostile Iran, which had influence with militant groups that were holding several US hostages in Lebanon, and funding an anti-communist guerrilla war in democratic Nicaragua. Both actions were in direct violation of specific acts of Congress which prohibited the sale of weapons to Iran, as well as in violation of United Nations sanctions against Iran. The rule of law and the spread of democracy fell victim to US geopolitical exceptionalism.

Israel's preemptive strike in Iraq
On June 7, 1981, during a period in which US-Iraq relations was at an all-time high, and US and European companies were carrying on highly lucrative trade deals with an Iraq flushed with Saudi money to finance the drawn-out Iraq-Iran war, Israeli F-15 bombers and F-16 fighters bombed and destroyed the French-built Osirak reactor 18 miles south of Baghdad, on orders from Menachem Begin, who said he believed the reactor was designed to make nuclear weapons to destroy Israel. It was the world's first air strike against a nuclear plant. The billion-dollar 70-megawatt uranium-powered reactor, paid for with Saudi funds, was near completion, but had not been stocked with nuclear fuel so there was no danger of radiation leak, according to the French contractor which sold the reaction to Iraq under an international non-proliferation regime. The French also maintained that the Osirak reactor was not capable of producing plutonium for bombs. IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguards promised independent regular inspections and French technicians were required to be present for five to 10 years following initial operation. It would not have been possible for Iraq to make an undetected fuel conversion or to misuse the fuel supplied. General Yehoshua Saguy, head of the intelligence division of the Israel Defense Force prior to the air strike, argued for continuing to try to find a non-military solution to the threat within the five to 10 years he felt Israel still had before Iraq would have its first nuclear weapons. (Ilan Peleg, Begin's Foreign Policy, 1977-1983, Israel's Move To The Right - New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. p 187.) Begin ordered the Osirak reactor bombed because he feared that his party would lose the next election, and he did not believe the opposition party would have the toughness to preempt production of the first Iraqi nuclear bomb. Begin told a close political advisor, "I know there is an election coming. If they [Labor] win, I will lose my chance to save the Jewish people." (p 365.) The Israeli fear of nuclear attack from neighboring Arab countries is strategically unjustified. A nuclear attack on Israel would also kill Arabs on a massive scale in the area. Five decades of Cold War superpower nuclear deterrence has established firmly the effectiveness of the principle of mutual massive destruction (MAD). The best insurance against an Arab nuclear attack on Israel is to stop the forced evacuation of Palestinian Arabs from Israel. The Arabs want the land occupied by Israel back to enjoy, not destroy it with radiation.

Harvard nuclear physics professor Richard Wilson, who visited the reactor after the attack, argued that preemption is a dangerous game. The world faces unprecedented threats from terrorism. If they involve weapons of mass destruction, many people argue that we cannot wait until there is a specific threat, but must consider preemptive strikes. But we must be careful. Non-technical commentators often start with technically incorrect premises, and build up a case for preemptive strikes that is as dangerous as it is incorrect. Wilson visited the nuclear research reactor in Iraq on December 29, 1982 and visually inspected the reactor (which had been only partially damaged) and its surrounding equipment. To collect enough plutonium using Osirak would have taken decades, not years. French nuclear reactor engineer Yves Girard was aware of the carelessness of the Canadians in supplying a heavy water reactor to India, and the French in selling the Dimona reactor to Israel without insisting on any international safeguards to prevent military application. In 1975, Girard refused to help to supply a heavy water moderated reactor to Iraq. Instead, the Osirak reactor was moderated by light water, and therefore deliberately unsuited to making plutonium for bombs. The day after the bombing, Begin incorrectly described Osirak with misleading specifications of the Israeli Dimona reactor.

The chairman of the Board of Governors of the IAEA, Bertrand Goldschmidt, was reportedly livid about the Israeli bombing, as were many other experts. While as a French Jew who had worked on the Manhattan project, he had especial sympathy for Israel, he was concerned that Israel had damaged attempts by the international community, with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to control the nuclear genie which had been let out of the bottle in 1945 by the US.

The Israeli bombing of the Osirak reactor infuriated the Iraqis. They had followed international rules openly and accepted international inspections, and yet were bombed by a country which allowed no inspections of its own nuclear plants. Wilson reported that Iraqi fast-track for bomb development began in July 1981, after the Israeli bombing. The preemptive strike seemed to have had the opposite effect to that intended. Worse still, Israeli and US intelligence deluded themselves into thinking that once bombed, the threat of Iraqi bomb-making was over. The Iraqi bomb program became generally known in 1991, and a number of experts wrote about it in the Israeli journal New Outlook. The general consensus was that the Israel had no justification in bombing Osirak.

Iraq, the rogue regime, swallowed the attack stoically. Yet the incident radicalized Iraqi politics. One shudders to think what the US would have done if one of its nuclear power plants operating under NPT rules had been attacked. Yet this precedent of bombing an Iraqi nuclear power plant built under an operative international non-proliferation regime by a Western power had been set in the name of proliferation preemption, giving justification and impetus to secret nuclear programs that are much more difficult to monitor.

With the widespread acknowledgement by many experts that the components for assembling a nuclear device can easily be purchased in the open market for around $2 million, or a fully-assembled device for $20 million, the claim of US Vice President Dick Cheney in his acceptance speech in the Republican Convention in New York in late August this year that the illicit global nuclear proliferation network had been effectively shut down by Bush's "war on terrorism" sounded like a pitch to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to a gullible public. An iron rule of terrorism is what goes around, comes around from geopolitical blowback. One cannot exterminate terrorism any more than mosquitoes, except by reordering the ecosystem. Until the inequities of the socio-political ecosystem are eliminated, terrorism will continue to exist.

On the state level, one glaring lesson from the second Iraq War is that non-possession of nuclear weapons has become an open invitation to enemy invasion. Every government now will realize it is its sovereign responsibility to avail itself of nuclear capability for the defense of the nation, because the absence of nuclear capability has been turned into negative proof of intent to acquire such capability, which in turn provides the justification of reckless preemptive attack, undeterred by nuclear retaliation on the attacker. Nuclear proliferation will continue until all nuclear powers pledge themselves to the doctrine of no-first-use and the doctrine of no military force against non-nuclear nations.

An Iranian counter-offensive in 1982, aided by fresh US arms from the Iran-Contra deal, reclaimed much of the territory lost to Iraq during the early phase of the war. On November 26, 1983, Reagan signed a secret order instructing the US government to do "whatever was necessary and legal" to ensure that Iraq was not defeated in its war with Iran. At this time, the Reagan administration openly acknowledged its awareness that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction and that chemical weapons were used almost daily against Iranian forces (Washington Post December 30, 2002), but for geopolitical reasons chose to avoid making an issue out of these intelligence reports. In December 1983, Donald Rumsfeld, as secretary of defense, was sent by Reagan to Iraq to meet with Saddam to offer whatever assistance might be required. In November 1984, Reagan restored full diplomatic status to Iraq after meeting in Washington with Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz.

The New York Times reported on August 29, 2002 that from 1982 to 1988, the US Defense Intelligence Agency provided detailed information to Iraq on Iranian deployments, tactical planning for battles, plans for air strikes and bomb damage assessments.

In March 1986, the US and Britain blocked all UN Security Council resolutions condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons, and on March 21 the US was the only country refusing to sign a Security Council statement condemning Iraq's use of these weapons. The US Department of Commerce licensed 70 biological exports to Iraq between May of 1985 and 1989, including at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax. In May 1986, the US approved shipment of weapons-grade botulin poison to Iraq. In late 1987, Iraq began using chemical agents against Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq.

Four major battles were fought in the Iran-Iraq war from April to August 1988, in which the Iraqis effectively used chemical weapons to defeat the Iranians. Nerve gas and blister agents such as mustard gas were used, in violation of the Geneva Accords of 1925. By this time, the US Defense Intelligence Agency was heavily involved with Saddam's military in battle-plan assistance, intelligence gathering and post-battle debriefing. In the last major battle of the war, 65,000 Iranians were killed, many with poison gas.
TOMORROW: The burden of being a superpower

Other articles in this series:
Geopolitics in Iraq an old game
Geopolitical weeds in the cradle of civilization

Henry C K Liu is chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

1_1_4 On the origins of Cold War

For a New Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard part 13  14 War and Foreign Policy

Open Fire and Open Markets Strategy of an Empire

The 9/11 attacks gave the US an ideal pretext to use force to secure its global domination
by Michael Meacher Massive attention has now been given - and rightly so - to the reasons why Britain went to war against Iraq. But far too little attention has focused on why the US went to war, and that throws light on British motives too. The conventional explanation is that after the Twin Towers were hit, retaliation against al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan was a natural first step in launching a global war against terrorism. Then, because Saddam Hussein was alleged by the US and UK governments to retain weapons of mass destruction, the war could be extended to Iraq as well. However this theory does not fit all the facts. The truth may be a great deal murkier.

We now know that a blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana was drawn up for Dick Cheney (now vice-president), Donald Rumsfeld (defense secretary), Paul Wolfowitz (Rumsfeld's deputy), Jeb Bush (George Bush's younger brother) and Lewis Libby (Cheney's chief of staff). The document, entitled Rebuilding America's Defenses, was written in September 2000 by the neoconservative think tank, Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Also See: Ex-UK Environment Minister Sparks Fury Over Claims on September 11 and Iraq War

MP Michael Meacher UK Environment Minister from 5/97-6/2003

The plan shows Bush's cabinet intended to take military control of the Gulf region whether or not Saddam Hussein was in power. It says "while the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein."

The PNAC blueprint supports an earlier document attributed to Wolfowitz and Libby which said the US must "discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role". It refers to key allies such as the UK as "the most effective and efficient means of exercising American global leadership". It describes peacekeeping missions as "demanding American political leadership rather than that of the UN". It says "even should Saddam pass from the scene", US bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently... as "Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests as Iraq has". It spotlights China for "regime change", saying "it is time to increase the presence of American forces in SE Asia".

The document also calls for the creation of "US space forces" to dominate space, and the total control of cyberspace to prevent "enemies" using the internet against the US. It also hints that the US may consider developing biological weapons "that can target specific genotypes [and] may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool".

Finally - written a year before 9/11 - it pinpoints North Korea, Syria and Iran as dangerous regimes, and says their existence justifies the creation of a "worldwide command and control system". This is a blueprint for US world domination. But before it is dismissed as an agenda for rightwing fantasists, it is clear it provides a much better explanation of what actually happened before, during and after 9/11 than the global war on terrorism thesis. This can be seen in several ways.

First, it is clear the US authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9/11. It is known that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Two senior Mossad experts were sent to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a cell of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation (Daily Telegraph, September 16 2001). The list they provided included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom was arrested.

It had been known as early as 1996 that there were plans to hit Washington targets with airplanes. Then in 1999 a US national intelligence council report noted that "al-Qaida suicide bombers could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the White House".

Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas in Saudi Arabia. Michael Springman, the former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, has stated that since 1987 the CIA had been illicitly issuing visas to unqualified applicants from the Middle East and bringing them to the US for training in terrorism for the Afghan war in collaboration with Bin Laden (BBC, November 6 2001). It seems this operation continued after the Afghan war for other purposes. It is also reported that five of the hijackers received training at secure US military installations in the 1990s (Newsweek, September 15 2001).

Instructive leads prior to 9/11 were not followed up. French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui (now thought to be the 20th hijacker) was arrested in August 2001 after an instructor reported he showed a suspicious interest in learning how to steer large airliners. When US agents learned from French intelligence he had radical Islamist ties, they sought a warrant to search his computer, which contained clues to the September 11 mission (Times, November 3 2001). But they were turned down by the FBI. One agent wrote, a month before 9/11, that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers (Newsweek, May 20 2002).

All of this makes it all the more astonishing - on the war on terrorism perspective - that there was such slow reaction on September 11 itself. The first hijacking was suspected at not later than 8.20am, and the last hijacked aircraft crashed in Pennsylvania at 10.06am. Not a single fighter plane was scrambled to investigate from the US Andrews Air Force base, just 10 miles from Washington DC, until after the third plane had hit the Pentagon at 9.38 am. Why not? There were standard FAA intercept procedures for hijacked aircraft before 9/11. Between September 2000 and June 2001 the US military launched fighter aircraft on 67 occasions to chase suspicious aircraft (AP, August 13 2002). It is a US legal requirement that once an aircraft has moved significantly off its flight plan, fighter planes are sent up to investigate.

Was this inaction simply the result of key people disregarding, or being ignorant of, the evidence? Or could US air security operations have been deliberately stood down on September 11? If so, why, and on whose authority? The former US federal crimes prosecutor, John Loftus, has said: "The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9/11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence."

Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US air force complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism.

The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint. From this it seems that the so-called "war on terrorism" is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider US strategic geopolitical objectives. Indeed Tony Blair himself hinted at this when he said to the Commons liaison committee: "To be truthful about it, there was no way we could have got the public consent to have suddenly launched a campaign on Afghanistan but for what happened on September 11" (Times, July 17 2002). Similarly Rumsfeld was so determined to obtain a rationale for an attack on Iraq that on 10 separate occasions he asked the CIA to find evidence linking Iraq to 9/11; the CIA repeatedly came back empty-handed (Time Magazine, May 13 2002).

In fact, 9/11 offered an extremely convenient pretext to put the PNAC plan into action. The evidence again is quite clear that plans for military action against Afghanistan and Iraq were in hand well before 9/11. A report prepared for the US government from the Baker Institute of Public Policy stated in April 2001 that "the US remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to... the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East". Submitted to Vice-President Cheney's energy task group, the report recommended that because this was an unacceptable risk to the US, "military intervention" was necessary (Sunday Herald, October 6 2002).

Similar evidence exists in regard to Afghanistan. The BBC reported (September 18 2001) that Niaz Niak, a former Pakistan foreign secretary, was told by senior American officials at a meeting in Berlin in mid-July 2001 that "military action against Afghanistan would go ahead by the middle of October". Until July 2001 the US government saw the Taliban regime as a source of stability in Central Asia that would enable the construction of hydrocarbon pipelines from the oil and gas fields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean. But, confronted with the Taliban's refusal to accept US conditions, the US representatives told them "either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs" (Inter Press Service, November 15 2001).

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. Some advance warning of the attacks was received, but the information never reached the US fleet. The ensuing national outrage persuaded a reluctant US public to join the second world war. Similarly the PNAC blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor". The 9/11 attacks allowed the US to press the "go" button for a strategy in accordance with the PNAC agenda which it would otherwise have been politically impossible to implement.

The overriding motivation for this political smokescreen is that the US and the UK are beginning to run out of secure hydrocarbon energy supplies. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60% of the world's oil production and, even more importantly, 95% of remaining global oil export capacity. As demand is increasing, so supply is decreasing, continually since the 1960s.

This is leading to increasing dependence on foreign oil supplies for both the US and the UK. The US, which in 1990 produced domestically 57% of its total energy demand, is predicted to produce only 39% of its needs by 2010. A DTI minister has admitted that the UK could be facing "severe" gas shortages by 2005. The UK government has confirmed that 70% of our electricity will come from gas by 2020, and 90% of that will be imported. In that context it should be noted that Iraq has 110 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in addition to its oil.

A report from the commission on America's national interests in July 2000 noted that the most promising new source of world supplies was the Caspian region, and this would relieve US dependence on Saudi Arabia. To diversify supply routes from the Caspian, one pipeline would run westward via Azerbaijan and Georgia to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. Another would extend eastwards through Afghanistan and Pakistan and terminate near the Indian border. This would rescue Enron's beleaguered power plant at Dabhol on India's west coast, in which Enron had sunk $3bn investment and whose economic survival was dependent on access to cheap gas.

Nor has the UK been disinterested in this scramble for the remaining world supplies of hydrocarbons, and this may partly explain British participation in US military actions. Lord Browne, chief executive of BP, warned Washington not to carve up Iraq for its own oil companies in the aftermath of war (Guardian, October 30 2002). And when a British foreign minister met Gadaffi in his desert tent in August 2002, it was said that "the UK does not want to lose out to other European nations already jostling for advantage when it comes to potentially lucrative oil contracts" with Libya (BBC Online, August 10 2002).

The conclusion of all this analysis must surely be that the "global war on terrorism" has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda - the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project. Is collusion in this myth and junior participation in this project really a proper aspiration for British foreign policy? If there was ever need to justify a more objective British stance, driven by our own independent goals, this whole depressing saga surely provides all the evidence needed for a radical change of course.

Michael Meacher MP was environment minister from May 1997 to June 2003

'Cost of Empire' The High Price of US Policies

TheStar.com - Goodwill squandered George W. Bush prepares to quietly mark 9/11 anniversary with little to show for his war on terror TIM HARPER

WASHINGTON—As he stood atop a wrecked fire engine, shouting encouragement through a bullhorn to exhausted World Trade Center rescue workers, the response came in a defiant cadence, louder and louder.

"U.S.A., U.S.A.," they shouted back at George W. Bush, and in the days following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, who among us didn't feel a kinship with his grieving nation?

A thirst for retribution had international support and understanding from a sympathetic world and Americans instinctively closed ranks behind their commander-in-chief.

Yet, handed as much political capital as any president in U.S. history, Bush has done the near-impossible in only 24 months, squandering the global goodwill and watching his domestic backing erode daily.

Next Thursday, when he will quietly mark the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 in his country, Bush will have little in the way of anti-terrorism victories to take to Americans two years after his declaration of the "first war of the 21st century."

Instead, he will address the nation tonight as he heads back to the United Nations, cap in hand, looking for money and manpower from the organization he had derided as slipping into irrelevancy when it refused to support his campaign in Iraq.

He looks, as Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry suggested last week, like a man who needs some friends in this world.

In both Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush and his administration are quite rightly tarred as the gang that fights good war, but forges lousy peace — more interested in dropping smart bombs than building democracies.

"We fight the war very well, but we display a mix of indifference and incompetence at managing the post-war environment," says Flynt Leverett, a scholar at Washington's Saban Centre and former CIA analyst.

"I think it is traceable to a serious intellectual deficit, or conceptual deficit, at the heart of the policy."

Bush is again courting a transatlantic rift and a reprise of the diplomatic fights with France and Germany that marked the pre-war period.

Kerry and other Democratic candidates looking to unseat him in next year's election are tripping over each other to decry the Iraqi mission and Republican unilateralism in a bid to catch up to Howard Dean, the front-running Democrat who fashioned an improbable lead by casting himself early as the anti-war candidate and waiting for the wave to come to him.

Bush and his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, now stand accused of substituting arrogance for foreign-policy vision and of replacing diplomacy and flexibility with stubbornness and rigid ideology.

The "evil-doers" Bush pledged to hunt down remain at large, regrouping and conspiring as American troops are stretched beyond their capacity in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"This enormous outpouring of sympathy was so rare because U.S. foreign policy doesn't usually engender sympathy," says Phyllis Bennis, author of Before And After: U.S. Foreign Policy And The September 11 Crisis. "The idea that this could have been squandered is particularly horrific." Bennis argues that Bush began to toss out the goodwill shortly after 9/11, when he told the nations of the world that they were either for him or against him and suggested that those who would not join his crusade were on the side of terrorism.

"America was acting as if they were the only ones who had ever been attacked in this way," Bennis says. "If ever there was a time that should have taught us we needed the rest of the world to bring the perpetrators to justice, this was it.

"Instead, the argument was: You have to be with us in our crusade."

James Rubin, an international relations professor at the London School of Economics and former State Department official in the Clinton administration, argues that America lost its diplomatic compass under Bush because it let military objectives and timelines guide its foreign policy. Exercising power without careful diplomacy has left the United States' reputation in tatters," Rubin writes in Foreign Affairs magazine. European leaders saw through the charade at the U.N. Security Council before the U.S.-led March invasion, knowing Washington would never be satisfied with anything less than war in Iraq. He cites Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney — representing the hawkish wing of an administration that could never deliver a coherent message — for disparaging the U.N. and its arms inspectors.

But, Rubin says, the well had been poisoned with Europe even before Sept. 11, when the bullying Bush government came to power — the president wearing his unilateralism on his sleeve as his administration pulled out of and disparaged international treaties ranging from the Kyoto protocol on the environment to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and, most important, the International Criminal Court.

"One reason Washington's goodwill reserve had all but vanished is that European countries pay a lot of attention to treaties," Rubin writes.

A poll published in Canada in the spring showed Bush to be the least popular American president since Canadians have been asked to rate their approval of U.S. leaders.

In western Europe, Bush and his foreign policy have never been more unpopular, according to a major American-European poll released this month.

The poll of 8,000 Americans and Europeans was conducted by the Italian Compagnia di San Paolo and the U.S. German Marshall Fund.

When they measured approval of Bush's foreign policy, they found 60 per cent of Americans backed their president. But of the seven European countries canvassed, only in Poland — with a sizeable troop contingent now in Iraq — did a majority of respondents back Bush.

Approval was at 16 per cent in Germany and 15 per cent in France. In Tony Blair's Britain, only 35 per cent approved Bush's performance on the world stage.

Perhaps most telling, 78 per cent of Europeans polled said they thought U.S. unilateralism posed a possible international threat over the next 10 years.

"There is a Bush style that really does drive Europeans up a wall," German Marshall Fund president Craig Kennedy told the Washington Post.

However, since Bush's views are still backed by a majority of Americans, a Democratic president would have