Home Improvement, Post-9/11; Part I: Wood Chips Tell A Sad Story

I've just finished helping a friend set up some new flower beds and trim them with a border of wood chips.

It's a good way to mulch, with recycled organic matter blotting out weeds on the way to becoming plant food.

We used 12 cubic yards of chips. That's not a lot by industrial standards, but it took us two days to put those chips where we wanted them.

And while we were doing that, I was playing around with a few numbers...

There are 3 feet in a yard and therefore there are 3x3x3 = 27 cubic feet in a cubic yard. We moved 12 cubic yards or 12x27 = 324 cubic feet of wood chips.

That's enough to cover a path 3 feet wide, 4 inches thick, and 324 feet long.

On a football field, such a path would extend from one end zone to the other.

There are 12 inches in a foot and therefore there are 12x12x12 = 1728 cubic inches in a cubic foot.

We moved 324 cubic feet or 324x1728 = 559,872 cubic inches of wood chips.

That's about half a million cubic inches of chips.

Picture a cubic inch: it's about the size of a golf ball. You can hold it between your thumb and forefinger. You can put it in your shirt pocket.

Remember that cubic inch; hold on to that image. Now let's get hypothetical...

If each cubic inch of wood chips were worth two dollars, the chips on that path -- three feet wide, four inches thick, from one end zone to the other -- would be worth about a million dollars. Even with inflation, a million is still a very large number.

If each cubic inch of wood chips were worth a million dollars, the chips on that path would be worth about $500 billion, which is roughly the size of the Pentagon's annual operating budget, not including black-budget programs or additional appropriations for actual wars, such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Think of this: A million dollars per cubic inch. Three feet wide; four inches thick. One end zone to the other. Year after year after year. And that's just for standard operations.

Clandestine acts of terrorism and overt wars of aggression cost extra, of course.

How much extra? Look at it this way: If each cubic inch of wood chips were worth two hundred thousand dollars, the chips on that path would be worth about $100 billion, roughly as much as congress just approved to keep the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan going until the end of September!

And that's just the cost to America. It's a pittance compared to the cost borne by the rest of the world.

And how much is that? Consider Iraq:

If each cubic inch of wood chips represented three people killed, at least six others injured, and nine more refugees, the chips on that path -- four inches thick, three feet wide, from one end zone to the other -- would show just some of the damage we have done to Iraq.

The people of Iraq, if you recall, never attacked us, never intended to attack us, and never could have done us any damage even if they had wanted to. That didn't matter to the president who started the war, it doesn't matter to the president who is continuing it, and it doesn't matter to the Americans who support it.

We are talking about mass murder of innocent people as a matter of state policy. And there's no reason for it, none at all ... except:

If each cubic inch of wood chips were two million barrels of oil...

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How Not To Fix The Economy

Some ideas arrive too soon, some come along too late, and others simply wind up in the wrong place.

Here, courtesy of Atlantic Free Press, is an open letter to the president from William C. Carlotti, entitled "How to Fix the Economy":

Dear Mr. President,

Please find below my suggestion for fixing America’s economy. Instead of giving billions of dollars to companies that will squander the money on lavish parties and unearned bonuses, use the following plan. You can call it the Patriotic Retirement Plan:

There are about 40 million people over 50 in the work force.

Pay them $2 million a piece severance for early retirement---$80 million dollars is less than 10% of the $85 billion that you gave to CitiCorp.-- with the following stipulations:

1) They MUST retire. Forty million job openings - Unemployment fixed.

2) They MUST buy a new American CAR. Forty million cars ordered - Auto Industry fixed.

3) They MUST either buy a house or pay off their mortgage - Housing Crisis fixed.

It can't get any easier than that!

P.S. If more money is needed, have all members in Congress and their constituents pay their taxes...

If you think this would work, please forward to everyone you know. If not, please disregard.

Respectfully,

William C. Carlotti
North Montpelier
Vermont, May 9, 2009

I have no wish to be presumptuous, and of course the president may answer Mr. Carlotti's letter (or not) as he sees fit.

But if I were the president I would surely write back:

Dear Mr. Carlotti,

Unfortunately, if the government were to give 40 million people $2 million apiece, that wouldn't cost $80 million ($80,000,000).

It would cost $80 trillion ($80,000,000,000,000) -- roughly 25 times the amount the entire federal government spent last year.

So your suggestion is not exactly feasible.

However, some of my friends like the way you describe $80 million as "less than 10% of ... $85 billion"; in fact it is much less than that: $80 million is less than 1/10 of 1% of $85 billion.

My friends, who like the way you think, would like to help you. And judging from what you have written, you appear to be ideally suited for a job as an auditor. Have you considered submitting a resume to the Pentagon?

I would do so immediately, sir. You're just the sort of bean-counter they're always looking for.

Yours sincerely
Winter Patriot, POTUS

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Wrong Again! Twice! Another Look At Azizabad And Wall Street

I've made a few mistakes lately and it's time to 'fess up. I was wrong about the Azizabad massacre, and I was wrong about the Wall Street bailout, too. Oops.

The Azizabad Massacre

On August 22, an American airstrike killed more than 90 innocent people in Afghanistan. Most of them were sleeping children.

At the time, I assumed the Pentagon would write off the victims as "collateral damage" and I wrote a piece to that effect. But that didn't happen; instead our military spokesmen denied the story, saying that the airstrike had killed at least 25 "militants" and that at most five civilians had been killed.

Investigators from Afghanistan and the UN went to the scene, interviewed the survivors, looked at the graves, and confirmed the original reports. But the Pentagon stuck to its story. I wrote a second post on the attack in which I mentioned that the damage to civilians was even worse than what had been reported; I also mentioned that the word was being leaked: the Americans had been deceived. An unidentified spokesman blamed the attack on misinformation that the Americans had been given by the Taliban. But the US still didn't admit killing all those people.

Instead Pentagon spokesmen insisted that the UN and Afghan inspectors had been fooled by the survivors of the attack, who (according to the Pentagon) had made up the story about all their relatives being killed. The US even accused the survivors of fabricating evidence -- dead children in graves, and so on. No American investigator ever visited the scene, no Pentagon representative asked any questions on the ground. Instead they just told us what they wanted us to believe. And it was all a pack of lies, of course.

I say "of course" because this is only the latest in a long series of events in which Americans have killed innocent people on the ground in Afghanistan and then lied about it repeatedly. The civilian casualties and the lies intended to cover them have even caused a strain in the Afghan-US "relationship".

If this strain ever got serious it could jeopardize the entire US occupation of Afghanistan, which would be a very good thing in my opinion because the US has no business occupying Afghanistan. The bombing, invasion and subsequent occupation are war crimes and crimes against humanity, just as our crimes against Iraq have been -- though very few will say so.

But I'll say it: the war in Afghanistan would be entirely unjustified, even if the official story of 9/11 were true, which it obviously isn't.

I was still following the Azizabad story when my computer began to break down, and I didn't get a chance to follow up on my two early stories. But Carlotta Gall, veteran war reporter for the New York Times, traveled to the scene, looked at the evidence, talked to the people, and filed a report that left no doubt that the UN and Afghan investigators had been right all along, and that the Pentagon had been blowing smoke up our backsides once again -- with enormous assistance from the American "news" media.

The Times of London posted a graphic cell-phone video from the scene of the atrocity, and reported:

As the doctor walks between rows of bodies, people lift funeral shrouds to reveal the faces of children and babies, some with severe head injuries.

Women are heard wailing in the background. “Oh God, this is just a child,” shouts one villager. Another cries: “My mother, my mother.”

The grainy video eight-minute footage, seen exclusively by The Times, is the most compelling evidence to emerge of what may be the biggest loss of civilian life during the Afghanistan war.

These are the images that have forced the Pentagon into a rare U-turn. Until yesterday the US military had insisted that only seven civilians were killed in Nawabad on the night of August 21.

The Times has much more to say, including:

In the video scores of bodies are seen laid out in a building that villagers say is used as a mosque; the people were killed apparently during a combined operation by US special forces and Afghan army commandos in western Afghanistan. The film was shot on a mobile phone by an Afghan doctor who arrived the next morning.

Local people say that US forces bombed preparations for a memorial ceremony for a tribal leader. Residential compounds were levelled by US attack helicopters, armed drones and a cannon-armed C130 Spectre gunship.

That's a C130 in the photo, and for the war-porn shot shown here it was shooting flares. For the sleeping children, they used live ammo.

Chris Floyd picked up on Carlotta Gall's report and wrote an excellent post about it, and Glenn Greenwald read Chris and wrote a good piece about it too. Here Greenwald quotes Floyd:

The mass death visited upon the sleeping, defenseless citizens of Azizabad encapsulates many of the essential elements of this global campaign of "unipolar domination" and war profiteering: the callous application of high-tech weaponry against unarmed civilians; the witless attack that alienates local supporters and empowers an ever-more violent and radical insurgency; and perhaps the most quintessential element of all -- the knowing lies and deliberate deceits that Washington employs to hide the obscene reality of its Terror War.

Greenwald drew attention to the amazing fact that the Pentagon's story had been broadcast into America's living rooms on a daily basis by FOX News, which was featuring reports from an "independent journalist".

It turned out that the "independent journalist" was none other than Oliver North, the convicted serial liar who was a useful tool of evil back in the days of the "Iran/Contra Scandal".

How quaint: a scandal!

To think there could even be one of those in these post-9/11 days. Sigh.

Greenwald also quoted Dan Froomkin quoting George Bush:

"Regrettably, there will be times when our pursuit of the enemy will result in accidental civilian deaths. This has been the case throughout the history of warfare. Our nation mourns the loss of every innocent life. Every grieving family has the sympathy of the American people."

Froomkin's comment:

It's a bit hard to convince people that our nation mourns the loss of every innocent life when we don't even acknowledge them.

He's playing on understatement, of course. It's not "a bit hard". It's impossible.

The photo of the injured Afghan boy comes to us courtesy of the AP via Froomkin's post at Nieman Watchdog.

Now I'm thinking back to the Bush quote:

Regrettably, there will be times when our pursuit of the enemy will result in accidental civilian deaths.

He didn't actually use the term "collateral damage" but he said virtually the same thing. So maybe I wasn't entirely wrong after all. But all those people are still dead.

And, unless I am much mistaken, they're dead because Americans called in an airstrike based on a tip they got from the "enemy". It's utterly preposterous, and despicable, and much worse than I originally thought it could be. Fool me once ...

The Wall Street Bailout

... fool me twice!

I was also wrong about the Wall Street bailout. On Sunday, I wrote a brief post congratulating my fellow citizens on our purchase of "toxic waste" "worth" $700 billion, and now it turns out that the purchase is off, or at least it has been delayed, after the House of Representatives refused to pass a bill backed by the President and the House leaders of both parties.

The vote was 228 to 205 against the bill, and the bipartisan breakdown is instructive: 65 Republicans and 140 Democrats voted for the bailout, while 133 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted against it.

In other words, more than 67% of the Republicans voted against the measure, while nearly 60% of the Democrats voted for it.

The Republicans have usually voted together, especially when the twice-unelected president has expressed firm views. And Bush has made his support of this bailout proposal very clear.

So there's no question that the president has been rebuffed by his own party on this matter. But -- as Chris Floyd points out -- this is not news; last month the big elephants didn't even let the little chimp speak at their convention.

Meanwhile, the donkey house leadership -- exemplified by Miss Impeachment-Is-Off-The-Table, Nancy Pelosi -- despite their best efforts, could only muster 60% of their "colleagues" in support of this obviously criminal president. So Pelosi has not only shown her truly treasonous colors once again; she's been rebuffed by a significant portion of her own party as well.

Nonetheless, House leaders and presidential mouthpieces say, they will try again to get this bill passed, perhaps later in the week. So the deal is not undone yet, and my reporting may have been more "premature" than "wrong".

Or it could be that, like the Azizabad story, the reality is much worse than my early reports indicated.

As it was becoming evident that the congress would not pass the bailout measure, the Federal Reserve announced that it

will pump an additional $630 billion into the global financial system...

There's no congressional vote on that, my friends, and we're not getting any toxic waste in return. It's just the first of many donations that will be made in rapid succession, unless I am very wrong.

The purpose of this particular transfusion is to

settle the funding markets down, and allow trust to slowly be restored between borrowers and lenders

as Bloomberg helpfully explains.

And that's the end of reality as a motive force, as far as I can tell.

The best way to restore trust between borrowers and lenders would be to resume the enforcement of laws against predatory lending practices, and to let the firms that have made too many bad investments disappear.

Arthur Silber, who has been digging very deeply into this story lately, reports that "the crisis" may cost as much as $5 trillion before they stop throwing money at it. Of course, by that time, things will be much worse than they are now.

And there's the rub.

The bailout is not a solution to the problem. It could never be a solution and it could never be taken seriously as a potential solution, for the simple reason that the problem is insoluble.

It's not even one problem. It's a tangled mess of problems, some of which were almost certainly created deliberately by our government and its best friends, primarily in order to separate us from our money.

The problems include: an insane level of military spending; repeated cuts to the funding of our social systems and physical infrastructure; excessive tax cuts, especially for the excessively rich; extreme deregulation, especially of the financial "industry"; the movement of formerly American industries to foreign countries; increasing global population; limited global resources; increasing destruction of our natural environment; and the strain of committing multiple war crimes simultaneously. All these forces acting together mean that things are getting more expensive, and that we are becoming less able to afford them.

We can't change any of this by giving hundreds of billions of dollars to the banks that have done the worst job of managing their investments, no matter how many hundreds of billions of dollars we give them.

Thus the "solution" cannot work; it doesn't even begin to address the problem; its only possible purpose is to steal your money and give it to some of the people who are most responsible for the mess we're in today.

So why would we do it?

Gimme an "F". Gimme an "E". Gimme an "A". Gimme an "R". What's that spell?

Some of the details in this NYT piece could be classified under "blackmail" ... or "extortion" ... or "terrorism". Like this:

Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., appearing at the White House late Monday afternoon, warned that the failure of the rescue plan could dry up credit for businesses big and small, making them unable to make payrolls or buy inventory. Vowing to continue working with Congress to revive the rescue plan, Mr. Paulson said it was “much too important to simply let fail.”

Supporters of the bill had argued that it was necessary to avoid a collapse of the economic system, a calamity that would drag down not just Wall Street investment houses but possibly the savings and portfolios of millions of Americans. Moreover, supporters argued, a lingering crisis in America could choke off business and consumer loans to a degree that could prompt bank failures in Europe and slow down the global economy.

And this:

Stock markets plunged as it appeared that the measure would go down to defeat, and kept slumping into the afternoon when that appearance became a reality. By late afternoon the Dow industrials had fallen more than 5 percent, and other indexes even more sharply. Oil prices fell steeply on fears of a global recession; investors bid up prices of Treasury securities and gold in a flight to safety. [...]

House leaders pushing for the package kept the voting period open for some 40 minutes past the allotted time at mid-day, trying to convert “no” votes by pointing to damage being done to the markets, but to no avail.

and this:

The United States Chamber of Commerce vowed to exert pressure, warning in a letter to members of Congress that it would keep track of who votes how. “Make no mistake,” the letter said. “When the aftermath of Congressional inaction becomes clear, Americans will not tolerate those who stood by and let the calamity happen.”

I've got news for you: The calamity is already happening, Americans have stood by and watched it develop for years without doing anything about it, and it's going to continue regardless of whether or not the federal government gives a few criminal banks more of our money than anyone can possibly imagine.

I've got more news for you: a scoop before its time, if you will...

Electing John McCain won't solve the problem.

Electing Barack Obama won't solve it either.

Now What?

I can't shake the feeling that these two stories are tied together in ways that transcend the obvious "WP was wrong".

For instance, I wonder whether a nation which tolerates -- not to say thrives on -- deliberate lies about the people it has killed, could possibly deserve anything other than a full-spectrum economic meltdown.

The USA has been attacking defenseless countries for generations.

What goes around, comes around.

And it's been a long time coming.

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Nation's Worst Polluter Thumbs Nose At Law, With White House Approval

The country's worst polluter has refused to accept the legally binding orders from the agency in charge of cleaning up polluted sites. And it has happened with full approval of the White House.

Lyndsey Layton reports for the Washington Post

Pentagon Fights EPA On Pollution Cleanup

The Defense Department, the nation's biggest polluter, is resisting orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up Fort Meade and two other military bases where the EPA says dumped chemicals pose "imminent and substantial" dangers to public health and the environment.

The Pentagon has also declined to sign agreements required by law that cover 12 other military sites on the Superfund list of the most polluted places in the country. The contracts would spell out a remediation plan, set schedules, and allow the EPA to oversee the work and assess penalties if milestones are missed.

The actions are part of a standoff between the Pentagon and environmental regulators that has been building during the Bush administration, leaving the EPA in a legal limbo as it addresses growing concerns about contaminants on military bases that are seeping into drinking water aquifers and soil.

Under executive branch policy, the EPA will not sue the Pentagon, as it would a private polluter. Although the law gives final say to EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson in cleanup disputes with other federal agencies, the Pentagon refuses to recognize that provision. Military officials wrote to the Justice Department last month to challenge EPA's authority to issue the orders and asked the Office of Management and Budget to intervene.

Experts in environmental law said the Pentagon's stand is unprecedented.

But what else would one expect?

"This is stunning," said Rena Steinzor, who helped write the Superfund laws as a congressional staffer and now teaches at the University of Maryland Law School and is president of the nonprofit Center for Progressive Reform. "The idea that they would refuse to sign a final order -- that is the height of amazing nerve."

Pentagon officials say they are voluntarily cleaning up the three sites named in the EPA's "final orders" -- Fort Meade in Maryland, Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida and McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey.

Fort Meade borders residential areas in fast-growing Anne Arundel County; Tyndall and McGuire are in less-populated regions. At all three sites, the military has released toxic chemicals -- some known to cause cancer and other serious health problems -- into the soil and groundwater.

But the EPA has been dissatisfied with the extent and progress of the Pentagon's voluntary efforts.

"Final orders" are the EPA's most potent enforcement tool. If a polluter does not comply, the agency usually can go to court to force compliance and impose fines up to $28,000 a day for each violation.

But none of tools usually used to force compliance are available this time. So sad.

Cleanup agreements drafted by the EPA for the 12 other sites contain "extensive provisions" that the Pentagon finds unacceptable, officials said.

Well let's just do whatever the Pentagon finds acceptable, then. And get it over with.

Big News! Military Analysts On TV May Not Be Impartial!

Big news! The retired pro-military men who show up on TV all the time telling pro-military lies may be getting their pro-military talking points from the Pentagon! Who would have guessed?

Big news! Many of them are making money off the war, and/or working for military contractors! How astonishing!

Big news! Anyone who doesn't push the approved message doesn't get invited back! Can you believe it?

Big news! There's a huge piece about all this at the New York Times, "Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand," written by David Barstow, who won't be on TV anytime soon.

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance [...]

I don't understand what Barstow means by "appearance of objectivity". To me, there's nothing "objective" about a military man in uniform on commercial television. "Retired" or not, it always looks like "PROPAGANDA!!"

And of course it is, as Barstow details in many ways, none of them astonishing in the slightest.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Who could have known?

Bush Says The War In Iraq Is Worth The Cost

From CBC: "Iraq war worth the cost: Bush"

Well of course he thinks so. He hasn't borne any of the cost.

He's become much more powerful and his friends have become much more wealthy.

They have killed more than a million people.

They have destroyed the lives of many millions of others.

They have looted two countries in the process.

And they still have the nerve to say things like this:

U.S. President George W. Bush will mark the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq by praising the "undeniable successes" of the surge in troops while justifying the "high cost in lives and treasure" lost in the war.

"The surge has done more than turn the situation in Iraq around; it has opened the door to a major strategic victory in the broader war on terror," Bush will say in a speech to be delivered Wednesday morning from the Pentagon.

While crediting the increase last year of 30,000 troops for making progress in the region, he will warn that pulling troops would only provide setbacks.

"We have learned through hard experience what happens when we pull our forces back too fast — the terrorists and extremists step in, fill the vacuum, establish safe havens and use them to spread chaos and carnage," Bush will say, according to excerpts of his speech released by the White House.

Bush has repeatedly vetoed efforts by the Democratic-led Congress to force troop withdrawals or set deadlines for pullouts.

"The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable, yet some in Washington still call for retreat," the president will say.

The White House has claimed that violence has dropped in Iraq since the surge. But Washington has been frustrated by what it views as the lack of political progress being made. In an interview this month with the Washington Post, Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said Iraqi leaders have failed to take advantage of the reduction in violence to make sufficient political progress.

As well, some observers say violence may be increasing again.

Cost of war exaggerated, Bush says

The war has claimed the lives of nearly 4,000 U.S. troops and cost U.S. taxpayers about $500 billion. But two respected economists recently pegged the eventual cost at $3 trillion.

Bush rejects the predictions, adding that the costs have been worth it.

"War critics can no longer credibly argue that we are losing in Iraq, so now they argue the war costs too much. In recent months, we have heard exaggerated estimates of the costs of this war," he will say.

"No one would argue that this war has not come at a high cost in lives and treasure but those costs are necessary when we consider the cost of a strategic victory for our enemies in Iraq," Bush will say.

Bush will also rebuff those who predicted Iraq would become a focal point where al-Qaeda would rally Arabs to drive America out.

"Instead, Iraq has become the place where Arabs joined with Americans to drive al-Qaeda out. In Iraq, we are witnessing the first large-scale Arab uprising against Osama bin Laden."

Larger-scale demonstrations are planned for Wednesday to mark the anniversary. Thousands of anti-war protesters are expected to converge on the U.S. capital.

New Study finds No Link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda

Conspiracy theorists have been saying for years that there was no link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al Qaeda; that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were antagonists; that Saddam had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks of 9/11. It may not seem like a big deal, since after all Saddam [seen here in a sandbagged bunker] is now dead, and the attacks of 9/11 happened a long time ago. But these assertions are at odds with statements made repeatedly by the president, the vice president, many other White House officials, and other supporters of the ongoing war in Iraq.

As you may recall, two main reasons were given to "justify" the American invasion and subsequent occupation of a defenseless oil-rich country. One of them was an alleged tie between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, possibly evidenced by a purported meeting between an Iraqi intelligence official and the putative lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta.

The other reason, of course, was Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction. The president, in one of his most delightful moments of levity, has admitted that this claim was only a joke.

And now the claim of a link between Saddam and al Qaeda, long challenged by opponents of the war, has been thoroughly debunked in a comprehensive study made by -- no! not another conspiracy theorist! -- the Institute for Defense Analyses, under contract with the Pentagon itself.

We weren't supposed to see the report. We weren't even supposed to see the press release announcing the release of the report. Well, guess what?

ABC News (of Australia) carried this story from AFP:

No link between Saddam and Al Qaeda: Pentagon

A detailed Pentagon study confirms there was no direct link between Iraqi ex-leader Saddam Hussein and the Al Qaeda network, debunking a claim US President George W Bush's administration used to justify invading Iraq.

The US administration tried to bury the release of the study, limiting distribution of the report and making it available only at individual request and by mail - instead of posting it on the internet or handing it out to reporters.

Indeed. But that lame attempt failed dismally -- and here's the report, a 94-page PDF, courtesy of ABC (US) News via TPM via Gandhi!

The AFP report from Australia continues:

Coming five years after the start of the war in Iraq, the study of 600,000 official Iraqi documents and thousands of hours of interrogations of former Saddam Hussein colleagues "found no smoking gun between Saddam's Iraq and Al Qaeda," said the study, quoted in US media.

Other reports by the blue-ribbon September 11 commission and the Pentagon's inspector general in 2007 reached the same conclusion but none had access to as much information.

"The Iraqi Perspective Project review of captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism" and "state terrorism became a routine tool of state power" but "the predominant target of Iraqi state terror operations were Iraqi citizens," said a summary of the Pentagon study.

Mr Bush, US Vice President Dick Cheney and top aides have insisted there were links between Saddam and Al Qaeda, citing the alleged ties as a rationale for going to war in Iraq.

"The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda," Mr Bush said in June 2004.

Can we talk about impeachment now? Can we talk about war crimes and crimes against humanity? How about some justice? How about some restitution?? How about some punishment????

Oh no! It's not possible, because we live in a democracy and we have a choice: We can have John McCain and troops in Iraq for another hundred years; or we can have Hillary Clinton and troops in Iraq forever; or we can have Barack Obama and be very very nice to everyone you meet and hope it will all work out fine in the end.