Damned: The Bloody Lies That Condemn Us All

The Center for Public Integrity has compiled an infinitely searchable catalog of the 935 lies told by the president and seven other top administration officials in order to instigate war between the United States and Iraq.

These deliberate (and in most cases, scripted) lies were told over a two-year period and were built on two basic fictional building blocks: [1] that Iraq threatened us with weapons of mass destruction, and [2] that Iraq supported al Qaeda and therefore bore responsibility for the attacks of September 11, 2001.

In the intelligence community, and in the well-informed segment of the general populace, both claims were widely known to be false, yet they were used and re-used and denied and debunked and embroidered and pasted together and used and re-used again, until the Mission was Accomplished and the United States was involved in a foreign war it couldn't get out of.

The eight administration officials indicted by this compilation are: the twice unelected President George W. Bush, the twice unelected Vice President Dick Cheney, current Secretary of State and former National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, and former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.

The deliberately deceitful actions of these eight people (and the many others who followed their lead) have resulted directly and immediately in the unwarranted deaths of at least a million people, and the unnecessary destruction of the lives of millions more. And it will kill and ruin many more, no matter how or when it ends.

By any civilized standard, all eight officials listed above are obviously guilty of mass murder, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

By any civilized standard, all eight should be arrested immediately and given speedy trials, which if fair would surely result in their convictions and public executions.

People of goodwill everywhere could only hope for the executions to be as slow and as painful as possible -- and seen and understood by billions.

But we all know that will never happen. We all know nothing even remotely like that will ever happen. And by failing to make that happen -- by failing to stop everything for as long as necessary in order to force that to happen -- We The People of the United States hereby forfeit any claim to being a civilized nation.

The lies in the database condemn the eight individuals listed above, and all their sycophants. But the failure to oppose them in any meaningful way condemns the rest of us.

We could stand shoulder-to-shoulder by the millions and shut down every big city. We could sit bumper-to-bumper in far smaller numbers and shut down the whole country.

We could. But we won't. And why not? Because we don't know enough? Or because we don't care enough?

It seems to me we know more than we ever did, so we must care less than ever. And the current political races seem to bear me out.

In the Democratic party there is one presidential candidate who would stop the war in Iraq immediately and whose platform is based on letting the people make the laws of the land. And he can't get into a debate and he can't get on TV and he can't raise any money and he can't get his poll numbers above 1%.

And that's in the so-called opposition party! Damn!

Gandhi: Madness! Stop Cheney!!

Here's the latest from my Australian friend Gandhi, who threatens the record, currently held by The Rolling Stones, for most unsuccessful attempts to retire:

This is madness. Bush and Cheney are both re-escalating the rhetoric against Iran. It's now quite clear that they will launch an attack unless somebody can stop them. And here's how it will happen:

The diplomatic effort in the United Nations will fail when it becomes clear that Russia's and China's geopolitical ambitions will not accommodate the inconvenience of energy sanctions against Iran. Without any meaningful incentive from the U.S. to be friendly, Iran will keep meddling in Iraq and installing nuclear centrifuges. This will trigger a response from the hard-liners in the White House...

That's from a lengthy Esquire interview with two former high-ranking policy experts from the Bush Administration. Among their startling revelations:

In April, Leverett accompanied Colin Powell on a tour that took them from Morocco to Egypt and Jordan and Lebanon and finally Israel. Twice they crossed the Israeli-army lines to visit Arafat under siege. Powell seemed to think he had authorization from the White House to explore what everyone was calling "political horizons," the safely vague shorthand for a peaceful future, so on the final day Leverett holed up in a suite at the David Citadel Hotel in Jerusalem with a group of senior American officials -- the U. . ambassador to Israel, the U. S. consul general to Jerusalem, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs Bill Burns -- trying to hammer out Powell's last speech.

Then the phone rang. It was Stephen Hadley on the phone from the White House. "Tell Powell he is not authorized to talk about a political horizon," he said. "Those are formal instructions."

"This is a bad idea," Leverett remembers saying. "It's bad policy and it's also humiliating for Powell, who has been talking to heads of state about this very issue for the last ten days."

"It doesn't matter," Hadley said. "There's too much resistance from Rumsfeld and the VP. Those are the instructions."

Read it all. Click the links.

Context Is Everything -- And Here's A Bit More

Imagine growing up in a family where every day, father raped daughter, mother tortured son, brother abused brother, sister stole from sister, and the whole family murdered neighbors, friends and passing strangers. Imagine the underlying assumptions about life that you would adopt without question in such an atmosphere, how normal the most hideous depravity would seem. If some outsider chanced to ask you about your family's latest activities, you would spew out perversions as calmly and unthinkingly as a man giving directions to the post office.

This state of unwitting confession to monstrous crime has been the default mode of the American Establishment for many years now. Government officials routinely detail policies that in a healthy atmosphere would shake the nation to its core, stand out like a gaping wound, a rank betrayal of every hope, ideal and sacrifice of generations past. Yet in the degraded sensibility of these times, such confessions go unnoticed, their evil unrecognized – or even lauded as savvy ploys or noble endeavors. Inured to moral horror by half a century of outrages committed by the "National Security" complex, the Establishment – along with the media and vast swathes of the population – can no longer discern the poison in the air they breathe. It just seems normal.

Thus wrote Chris Floyd, in April of 2006.

And so it was again this week when the Washington Post outlined the Pentagon's plan to put dirty war -- by death squad, by snatch squad, by secret armies, subversion, torture and terrorism -- at the very heart of America's military philosophy. Not defense against declared enemies, not deterrence of potential foes, but conducting "continuous" covert military operations in countries "where the United States is not at war" is now the Pentagon's "highest priority," according to the new "campaign plan for the global war on terror" issued by Donald Rumsfeld.

What’s more, the plan makes it clear that Rumsfeld, far from being politically vulnerable – as portrayed in the ludicrous kabuki of the Establishment media – has in fact been exalted above every other institution and official of the U.S. government, with the exception of the twin tyrants in the White House, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The Pentagon warlord has been given carte blanche to send the 53,000 secret soldiers of the Special Operations Command into any nation he pleases, to undertake any mission he pleases, without Congressional approval, legal restraint, or the authority of the target nation's U.S. ambassador. Thus America's diplomats, the ostensible representatives of the nation abroad, have been reduced to mere frontmen, pathetic beards for black ops savaging the laws, sovereignty and citizens of their hosts.

In light of the recent revelations about the war in Iran, and considering how we got here, I can't help but wonder:

If the Pentagon's "highest priority" is conducting "continuous" covert military operations in countries "where the United States is not at war", then what's to prevent them from doing the same thing here?

Or what's to say they haven't been doing the same thing here for a long time?

In other words, how is it possible to believe (as some people apparently still do believe) that the architects of this policy could not possibly have had a hand in 9/11?

Escalation: Secret War Against Iran Now Raging On Three Fronts

[Updated below]

Larisa Alexandrovna's most recent piece for Raw Story contains three connected stories, all on the same general theme, and it's a bit difficult to say which is the most important -- not only for me but apparently for the Raw Story editorial crew as well. This last bit is pure speculation on my part, but it would explain why the headline says "CIA running black propaganda operation against Iran, Syria and Lebanon, officials say" while the sub-head reads "Some intelligence sources more wary of covert Pentagon operations".

On the "covert terror ops being run from the Pentagon" angle, Larisa writes:

The Pentagon is continuing to conduct more aggressive “black” operations, approved by the National Security Council and the Office of the Vice President.

Current and former intelligence officials would not identify new specific covert programs running out of the Pentagon, though sources stressed these are far riskier and more truly covert operational activities against Iran than the activities of the CIA.

These operations started almost immediately after the Iraq war and have continued for several years. Because they can be considered part of a military operation, they are not subjects to the same requirements for Congressional authorization as the activities of the CIA.

The majority of these efforts to destabilize Iran through a covert war of aggression have been carried out by the Department of Defense, largely steered by the Office of the Vice President and by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Formerly known as the "crazies in the basement", these career prevaricators are still crazy ... but they have much nicer offices than they once did.

These activities have often been guided by the same individuals whose actions during Iran-Contra were the reason for a 1991 law on covert activities which for the first time clearly defined covert activities and how their oversight should be handled.

During Iran-Contra, the Reagan White House -– via the National Security Council -– sold weapons to Iran, an avowed enemy of the United States, and used the money to fund various terrorist and dissident groups, collectively called the Contras, to fight a proxy war against the government of Nicaragua.

Sources say that MEK has been used for intelligence collection, an activity which has traditionally fallen under the CIA. The administration also appears to be looking the other way as groups such as MEK commit acts of violence.

Intelligence sources interviewed for this article all expressed concern over the lack of attention to the Pentagon’s covert activities. Some believe illegal activities like those of the Iran-Contra days are now being hidden under the loophole of “traditional military activities” to avoid Congressional oversight.

Ain't that a good one? Congress has oversight privileges over the CIA but not over the Pentagon, so now they're running the most violent black ops out of the Pentagon in order to hide them from Congress -- and from us! And the Vice President, whose job technically consists of casting the deciding vote in the event of a tie in the Senate, is running covert terror ops in foreign countries! Wonderful stuff! It makes a fellow proud to be a Merkin!

On the black propaganda front, there's not much detail to be had, but here's some of it:

Iran is being targeted by the CIA's activities with a “pro-democracy” message, sources say, and the agency is supporting overt “pro-democracy” groups.

The program’s particulars are highly classified. Intelligence sources stress, however, that the groups being used are rather mainstream and the operations are almost entirely restricted to information warfare.

Sources would not identify what mechanism was being employed to distribute the propaganda, if it included news media, individuals or organizations, or whether that information was seeping back into domestic news reports.

One former intelligence case officer did explain that the CIA's program is operating largely outside of the Middle East and is aimed at identifying potential allies, as well as using already existing well known groups through whom information can be delivered. The type of “information” and the “groups” and “organizations” involved were not identified.

The third story involves clandestine and overt economic warfare being waged against Iran. Briefly:

The CIA “has been empowered to put economic pressure on Iran,” [a] former intelligence officer stated, but would not elaborate on what the meaning of “pressure” is.
...

Foreign intelligence sources say that economic pressure is aimed at Iran's oil-rich economy, with US efforts serving to “persuade” financial institutions, oil companies, and international investment interests to pull out of Iran and even drop already existing energy projects.

These sources cite the example of an unnamed company that is being denied financing for energy projects inside Iran by international banks, indicating that many more such examples exist.

Other possible forms of pressure would include less subtle activities, such as intercepting supply convoys and confiscating equipment.

And the crux of the matter is this: the USA is now waging a three-pronged mostly-covert war against Iran, none of which we are supposed to know about.

So move along, please ... quietly, now ... straight over to Raw Story for all the details!

UPDATE: Larisa spoke with Scott Horton on Antiwar Radio earlier today, and you can listen here.

VIDEO: Lawrence Wilkerson On National Security Decision-Making

Here's former Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, speaking on the grotesque beast the American National Security decision-making process has become since the Cheney-Dumsfeld administration took control:

Long but very interesting. A good link to put away for a slow news day, if we ever get another one of those.

Then again, the way things have been going, a day with fewer than three new scandals might qualify as "slow".

(Thanks to "Floridiot" for this and much else.)

Tom Toles: Cheney's Surprise Visit To Iraq

Another Victory For Torture: Germans Reject Investigation Request

German federal prosecutors on Friday rejected a U.S. group's formal request to investigate allegations that current and former Bush administration officials were complicit in the torture of military prisoners.

The New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights accused former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and eight other officials of either ordering, aiding or failing to prevent the torture.

According to a report from David Rising of the AP in the Washington Post,

German law allows the prosecution of war crimes regardless of where they were committed, and permits any citizen or group to formally request a criminal investigation.

In rejecting the complaint, prosecutors said that it was up to the U.S. to hold any inquiry, adding that there were no indications U.S. authorities or courts would not conduct one.

Of course they'll conduct one. They'll conduct as many as they have to. But there is no indication that it will be anything other than a whitewash, just like the "investigation" they did last time. And even the lapdog WaPo virtually admits as much:

Attorneys leading the case had said [...] they had documents from 2005 congressional hearings suggesting that Rumsfeld approved harsh methods [...]

After FBI agents raised concerns, the documents showed, military investigators began reviewing the case and in July 2005 said they confirmed abusive and degrading treatment [...] Still, the Pentagon determined that no torture had occurred.

So once again we're left with questions, such as:

Has it not dawned on the German prosecutors that the Pentagon will always determine that nothing illegal has occurred? Of course it has.

Would these same German prosecutors let a fox investigate mysterious death and destruction in a chicken coop? Apparently they would.

Center for Constitutional Rights President Michael Ratner vowed to pursue an appeal in Germany or action in another country.

"If Germany is not willing to enforce their law we think other countries will be. We're not going to leave a stone unturned," Ratner said by telephone from New York.

Splendid sentiment, but it seems rather unlikely that Ratner will find anyone with more backbone than the Germans who rejected the request.

The attorneys were also hopeful that testimony from former U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski -- the one-time commander of all U.S. military prisons in Iraq -- would bolster their case.

When the complaint was filed, Karpinski [...] told reporters in Berlin that she would testify against her superiors because only a handful of low-ranking soldiers have been convicted in the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

"People who are far more culpable and responsible have walked away blameless," Karpinski said.

But they wouldn't even talk to her.

So what have we learned?

Witnesses don't matter, testimony doesn't matter, the law doesn't matter, and the facts of the case don't matter.

Torturers should investigate their own crimes.

Welcome to hell.

Cynthia McKinney: "We Must Resist!"

Excerpt from an address given by former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA), who was in Los Angeles on the 2nd of March.

In order to solve the massive problems this country now has, it can no longer be business as usual for a critical mass of us.

Whether it's the thawing tundra in Siberia or the melting glaciers in Greenland, our contribution to global warming is something that must be dealt with.

Whether it's the massive amounts of money we spend on the war machine or the fact that we still don't know what happened on September 11th, the values and priorities of the American people must be reflected in the public policy we pursue. I do not believe that is the case today and there are specific reasons why.

I have long said that the black body politic is comatose: unable to sustain itself after the massive infusion of COINTELPRO-type "clean Negroes" who don't truly provide representation for a body of people in need.

Unfortunately, now, the entire American body politic is in dire straits, too.

I have also said that the prescription for the black body politic is radical surgery. So, too, now, I believe, is the case with the American body politic.

The extreme corruption of our political system by the greedy, unseen hand that comfortably operates in the backrooms of power is turning our heroes into caricatures of themselves.

Why can't we know the truth about 9/11 and this war on terror?

Why can't we immediately repeal the Secret Evidence Law, the Patriot Act, and the Military Tribunals Act?

Why can't we get back that 2.3 trillion dollars Rumsfeld admits is missing and use it to fully fund education and health care and infrastructure?

They're asking poor, devastated university students to return their Hurricane Katrina money, but I don't see anyone going after Blackwater mercenaries, the law enforcement officials who took federal money and then denied Katrina survivors safe passage over public thoroughfares. They're not going after the Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff whose incompetent behavior directly led to the delayed response, causing as-yet unmitigated pain and suffering on the people of New Orleans, and whose continued bumbling results in one of the largest depopulations of an American city in memory.

Why can't we know if there were explosions along the levies, as historically was done before to safeguard certain parts of New Orleans?

The reason we can't get answers to our questions and doubts linger is because our leadership today just isn't what it used to be.

The current state of black America didn't arise only because of Republican policies. Despite the election of thousands of black elected officials since passage of the Voting Rights Act, nearly half of the black men in New York City between the ages of 16 and 64 are unemployed, according to the New York Times. It will take 200 years for black Chicagoans to catch up to the quality of life enjoyed by white Chicagoans, according to a Hull House/Loyola University report. It will take 1,664 years for blacks in this country to achieve a homeownership rate equal to that of whites; racial disparities on infant mortality, family income, unemployment, police stops, imprisonment, and more, have not been eliminated and in some cases are worse today than at the time of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

People of color have less wealth, less net worth, work longer hours with insecure pensions and stagnant wages.

And now all Americans do, too!

We have got to do something different because we can't stand any more of this.

So what are we to do?

Just voting isn't enough. Voting is necessary, but it isn't enough to get the kind of change we must now demand. We have to change the structure within which we cast our vote.

We must have a different kind of leadership than is possible now without the kind of change I'm talking about.

This is revolutionary in its impact.

And so, [it] will be fought even more fiercely than I've already been fought, and all I wanted to do was improve the lot of people of color in the U.S. and around the world; institute the kind of respect for human rights at home and abroad that would change the policies of our government toward the global community, including the American people; and make the U.S. government accountable to the taxpayers for the way it spends their dollars. Now, that's all I wanted to do. And you see what's happened to me!

So, what I have in mind won't be easy. But it will be worth it. And, I believe, it's possible to achieve.

Now, it would be nice if we could count on someone else to do it for us. And we would all join that person and make it happen. But, I reluctantly say that if no one else will do it, then I guess I'll have to do that, too!

Just like the Articles of Impeachment.

Finally, I have complete belief in the young people of our country and their ability to lead the kind of change that I'm talking about.

After all, it was the young people from just a few generations ago who faced attack dogs, water hoses, police beatings, and lynch mobs. They sat in at lunch counters across the country and stood up for our country.

And they won. And I know we all can do it again.

Now, should you ever waiver in your faith, just acknowledge this:

The world's most marginalized and dispossessed are already ahead of us in taking their countries back! Of course, starting in 1959 with Cuba, but then Venezuela, Cote d'Ivoire, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, India, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Haiti, and Nicaragua all have stood up to imperial domination -- and won!

In the meantime, we have to demand more from our representatives. How can you be against war if you finance war? And how can you be against George Bush if you won't impeach him?

The American people are being fed madness as sanity. But, this is not Oz, Wonderland, the Twilight Zone, and it's not 1984!

With every fiber in our being we must resist. Resist like Mario Savio told us to resist: with our entire bodies against the gears and the wheels and the levers of the machine.

We must resist because we claim no partnership in war crimes, genocide, torture, or crimes against humanity. We claim no complicity in crimes against the American people.

We will build a broad-based, rainbow movement for justice and peace. And we will win.

For more information, visit Cynthia McKinney's new website, All Things Cynthia McKinney.

To receive email updates from Cynthia McKinney, click here.

Portrait Of A Foreign Policy In Total Chaos

Michael Smith via Larisa says top US brass are prepared to resign if Bush orders an attack against Iran, amid questions as to whether an attack would be merely "reckless" or simply "impossible".

“There are four or five generals and admirals we know of who would resign if Bush ordered an attack on Iran,” a source with close ties to British intelligence said. “There is simply no stomach for it in the Pentagon, and a lot of people question whether such an attack would be effective or even possible.”
...
A generals’ revolt on such a scale would be unprecedented. “American generals usually stay and fight until they get fired,” said a Pentagon source. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, has repeatedly warned against striking Iran and is believed to represent the view of his senior commanders.

Meanwhile, Kathy at Larisa's blog quotes a new book by Andrew Cockburn which says Rumsfeld always wanted to nuke Russia ... well, Russia and China, really ...

Faced with the most awesome choices a simulated environment could present, placed in a situation that was designed and advertised as a rehearsal for what might one day be terrifyingly real, Rumsfeld had one primary response. He always tried to unleash the maximum amount of nuclear firepower possible.

If Cockburn has this right, Dumsfeld was an even more reckless maniac than we ever suspected -- difficult to imagine but quite possibly true! So it's a good thing he's gone ...

... unless he isn't! The Washington Times says Dumsfeld still goes to work at the pentagon every day, where he has a staff of seven, and Mike Whitney argues this means he's still running the works, not Bob Gates, who (as Michael Smith points out) has been among the voices warning the so-called president not to attack Iran.

Meanwhile the so-called vice president has made a "surprise" stop in Pakistan, where he has instructed Pakistani General President Pervez Musharraf to get tough on al-Q'aeda, which sounds pretty good until you read Sy Hersh, who says the USA is once again funding al-Q'aeda-related groups in the Middle East. The veep express was supposed to have stopped in Afghanistan, too, but that was cancelled because of "bad weather". Fog? Flak? What scared them off?

At Empire Burlesque, Chris Floyd has posted an excellent analysis of this particular criminal insanity.

Today, the time lag between a criminal policy and its consequences grows much shorter all the time -- just as the virulence of that response is potentially much greater. For example, the United States engineered an illegal and stupid "regime change" in Iran in 1953, but did not have to face any direct consequences of this folly for more than a quarter of a century, and even these consequences were relatively limited. But there is general agreement that an attempt at "regime change" in Iran now would result in horrific consequences, immediately, including the possible collapse of the oil-based global economy, Shiite uprisings throughout the Middle East (especially against American forces in Iraq), "asymmetric" retaliation at American targets both at home and abroad and other pleasantries. (Similarly, the lag time between supporting the global jihad – which began in 1979 under Democrat Jimmy Carter – and the first fruit of that blowback, the first bombing of the World Trade Center, was just 14 years. How short will be the blowback from this latest arming and funding of al Qaeda and other Sunni extremists? A few years? A few months? Or right now – as many of these groups are allied with the Iraqi insurgents?)

And so, beyond the inherent immorality of supporting al Qaeda (yet again); beyond the inherent immorality of fomenting terrorist strikes inside Iran (and elsewhere); beyond the inherent – and downright Hitlerian – immorality of invading Iraq and possibly invading Iran, we have the simple fact that in today's world, the United States simply cannot "get away" with such extravagant stupidities anymore, for any length of time whatsoever. The rot is too deep, the compound interest is too high and the consequences too dire and immediate.

It may be very true that the United States cannot "get away" with such extravagant stupidities anymore. But unless I am reading this way wrong, our so-called leaders have no intention of stopping now, let alone turning back.

Prepare to radiate!

Iran's Intelligence Minister Says Iran Has Identified 100 US And Israeli Spies

According to Reuters,

Intelligence Minister Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei was quoted by state television as saying Iran had "identified 100 American and Israeli spies at the Iranian border. They were planning to obtain military and political information within Iran".

There's more detail in this report from AFP via Yahoo News:

"One hundred people who were directly working for the US and Israeli intelligence ... who were intending to collect political and military information were identified and are now in our intelligence net," Intelligence Minister Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejeie was quoted as saying.

The minister added that a number of Iranians who wanted to take part in spying courses abroad had also been arrested, the semi-official Fars news agency reported Thursday.

"We were able to identify and arrest all those who wanted to take part in espionage course abroad under the guise of taking part in educational courses," Mohseni Ejeie said, without elaborating.

Early last month, Iranian MP Ahmad Tavakoli said that Iran had arrested a spy working in parliament's research centre who had been passing information on its nuclear programme to outlawed armed opposition group, People's Mujahedeen.

Iranian authorities claim that the United States supports armed groups in the country's border provinces, whose population includes Kurd, Arab or Baluch ethnic minorities.

What? The US supports armed groups in Iran? Is this paranoid fantasy?

According to Reuters,

Iran's highest authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has previously warned about a "velvet revolution" -- a supposed U.S. plot to use intellectuals and others inside the country to bring about "regime change".

Is Khamenei a raving paranoid lunatic? Or does he simply know a few things the average American doesn't?

As Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane have reported at Raw Story:

Much of the buildup to Iran has been entirely covert, using non-government assets and foreign instruments of influence to conduct disinformation campaigns, plant intelligence and commit acts of violence via proxy groups.

A few weeks prior to the Iraq invasion, in February 2003, Iran acknowledged that it was building a nuclear facility at Natanz, saying that the facility was aimed at providing domestic energy.
...
That spring, then-Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) opened a channel on Iran with former Iranian Minister Fereidoun Mahdavi, a secretary for Ghorbanifar. Both Weldon and Ledeen were told a strikingly similar story concerning a cross border plot between Iran and Iraq in which uranium had been removed from Iraq and taken into Iran by Iranian agents. The CIA investigated the allegations but found them spurious. Weldon took his complaints about the matter to Rumsfeld, who pressured the CIA to investigate a second time, with the same result.
...
In May 2003, with pressure for regime change intensifying within the US, Iran made efforts to negotiate a peaceful resolution with the United States. According to Lawrence Wilkerson, then-Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, these efforts were sabotaged by Vice President Cheney.

"The secret cabal got what it wanted: no negotiations with Tehran," Wilkerson said.

The US was already looking increasingly to rogue methodology, including support for the Iranian terrorist group MEK.
...
In March 2006, administration action became more overt. The State Department created an Office of Iranian Affairs, while the Pentagon created an Iranian Directorate that had much in common with the earlier Office of Special Plans. According to Seymour Hersh, covert US operations within Iran in preparation for a possible air attack also began at this time and included Kurds and other Iranian minority groups.

By setting up the Iranian Directorate within the Pentagon and running covert operations through the military rather than the CIA, the administration was able to avoid both Congressional oversight and interference from then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, who has been vocally skeptical about using force against Iran.

The administration may have been able to avoid Congressional oversight but it's hardly possible that the Iranians have failed to notice what's been going on in their country. Paranoid or not, they're being careful.

And what have they found? Americans and Israelis?

How preposterous! Since when has Israel been trying to provoke a war against Iran?

Court-Martial Begins For Army Officer Who Refused To Go To Iraq

Yesterday at Fort Lewis, Washington, the Army began its court-martial of First Lt. Ehren Watada, who has refused deployment to Iraq because he believes the war is illegal.

To those who have been following along during the past five or six years, the assertion that "the war in Iraq is illegal" seems completely obvious. And, possibly because the Army cannot dispute the contention, an Army judge has ruled that Lt. Watada cannot use the illegality of the war as a defense against the charges he faces.

According to William Yardley in the New York Times,

“From what I understand, that under military law those in the military are allowed to refuse — in fact, have the right to refuse unlawful orders — a duty to refuse,” Lieutenant Watada said last month...

It is also my understanding that soldiers do have a duty to refuse illegal orders. And it's very difficult for me to see how any order to participate in an illegal war can be considered a legal order.

So it is completely Orwellian -- and thoroughly unsurprising -- that

the judge, Lt. Col. John Head, reinforced on Monday an earlier ruling that Lieutenant Watada could not base his defense on his contention that the war is illegal.

After all, if the war is illegal, and if you can get out of fighting for that reason, what's to stop hundreds or thousands of soldiers from doing the very same thing Lt. Watada has done?

Therefore the Army will go to any lengths to deny Lt. Watada his due.

On Monday, Army prosecutors and a defense lawyer, Eric Seitz, interviewed potential jurors drawn from a pool of officers on this post. Under questioning, several officers said it was “odd” that Lieutenant Watada refused to go because, as one put it, officers “should support our leadership and our tent command.”

Wrong again! His duty is to support our Constitution. He has no duty to support "our leadership" if they are engaged in illegal activities.

At Nuremburg, in the War Crimes trial which followed the second World War, some German soldiers attempted to justify their actions on the grounds that they were "just following orders", but this line of defense was not accepted. According to the tribunal which tried the Nazis, their orders were illegal, so it was their duty to refuse them.

Wikipedia's article about the Nuremburg Principles makes this very clear:

Principle I
Any person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.
...
Principle IV
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.

The wording is very clear indeed, and a dozen high-ranking Nazis were hanged for contravening them.

But now, in the Watada court-martial, an American soldier is being told his first duty is to obey orders, and that his opinion as to whether or not they are legal is of no concern.

But ... is it really just his opinion? Or is the war really illegal?

In a piece for yesterday's Guardian, Colonel Tim Collins, former commander of the Royal Irish Regiment in Iraq, wrote:

The legal case against the war is unproven conjecture

which shows what he knows about it. The architects of this war knew it was illegal, and at least one of them actually said so in public in November of 2003:

International lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.

In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."
...
Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.

So that much, at least, is clear. But why let the truth stand in the way of a good story? Colonel Collins continues:

By submitting to military law, you surrender your citizen rights for the order and discipline of the military. [...] The odd prima donna believes that what they think matters more than duty. In service life, it does not. There is a clear option to resign.

According to William Yardley in the NYT,

Lieutenant Watada, of Honolulu, asked to go to Afghanistan instead of Iraq but he was denied. He also tried to resign but was denied.

So much for those options. Not very attractive options, either.

Oh, by the way: the war in Afghanistan is illegal, too.

But who's counting?

~~~

Supporters of Lt. Watada may be found at the following sites:

thankyoult.org

couragetoresist.org

wartribunal.org

(Thanks to Mike Barber of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer for these links.)

Entrapped "Terrorist" Matin Siraj To Appeal Conviction And Sentence

The legal saga of entrapped "terrorist" Shahawar Matin Siraj, who was sentenced to thirty years in prison for saying whatever his "best friend" led him to say, may not yet be over.

Not if his attorney, Martin Stolar, has anything to say about it, anyway.

According to Court Docs dot KRKeenan dot com, an appeal has already been filed, against both the conviction and the sentence:

The lawyer for Shahawar Matin Siraj, the man convicted for plotting to blow-up the Herald Square subway station, filed a notice of appeal the day after his case, though his sentencing has been overshadowed by the arrest of his family.

The other three members of the Siraj family were arrested by federal immigration officials early in the morning -- or in the middle of the night, really -- just hours after Matin's sentence was handed down.

Neigbors and friends of the Siraj family are calling for their release, calling the Immigration and Customs Enforcement action heavy-handed and discriminatory.

That's kind of them. I would use much harsher language, if anyone were so foolish as to ask me.

Before the sentencing, Matin’s lawyers filed letters and documents from friends and family members describing him as a simple-minded young man who was manipulated by his best friend Osama Eldawoody, the main witness in the case and a paid informant.

Let's put that phrase best friend in quotes, shall we? Osama Eldawoody was certainly no friend to Matin Siraj. None of this would have happened had not Matin mistakenly thought Eldawoody was his friend.

A letter filed by Matin’s lawyer Martin R. Stolar described Eldawoody as an Egyptian Sunni muslim who introduced Matin to the concept of using violence as a form of jihad.

“While acknowledging the jury’s verdict, it is apparent that confidential informant Eldawoody spent countless hours alone with Matin creating a deep emotional bond between the two. Eldawoody frequently drove Matin home to Queens from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, using the time alone to teach Matin about the Koran and the Hadiths, or teachings of the Prophet Muhammed. Because Matin came from the shi’a Ishmaeli sect of Islam - a sect considered apostate or un-Islamic by many “mainstream” Sunni Muslims, Eldawoody spent a significant amount of time teaching Mr. Matin about Islam as understood by Eldawoody, an Egyptian Sunni whose father was an Islamic scholar. In his efforts to encourage Matin to join and stay involved in the conspiracy, Eldawoody taught Matin that Islam and jihad embraced violent concepts such as “kill the killers” and that American soldiers in the Middle East are “killers.”

Matin was not intellectually capable of executing the plot he was convicted of, according to his lawyers. He participated in the scheme to win approval from Eldawoody, whom he sought to please, they wrote. The defense lawyers argued that Matin was far from a terrorist and simply a misguided youth.

Exactly. A misguided none-too-bright young man led astray by a professional, a slick and practiced master of the entrapment game. It's everywhere. All of a sudden because of the so-called War On Terror, young, simple Muslim men are getting conned into saying they'd do things that they would never do, much less think of. And then it turns out their "best friend" was wearing a wire, and they're going to prison for a long, long time. For nothing!

“There was no loss of life, no damage to property, and no criminal organization of which the defendant was a member. Further, the defendant himself is not a dangerous psychopath, but more of a confused and misguided youngster,” according to the defense counsel’s letter. “In fact, given the legitimate basis of the (rejected) entrapment defense, it may well be that an overly lengthy sentence would not promote respect because it would flag the government’s conduct in helping to create the crime only to claim a victory in the ”war on terror,” and not to ferret out those who may be genuinely engaged in such conduct.”

Yes and No on this one. Definitely it is true that the government by creating and then solving a crime can claim a victory (however small) in the "war on terror", but I do not agree that this is the only reason behind these entrapment-sting operations.

Such operations promote the myth that terror sleeper cells are everywhere throughout America. They feed into the War on Muslims, and thus they lend support to wars against Iraq and Afghanistan (and Iran next, and perhaps others "just around the corner"). They provide useful though implausible pretexts for the gutting of the Bill Of Rights, the general shredding of our Constitution, and the loss of all our legal protection against tyranny.

The timing is always politically convenient. Matin Siraj was arrested on August 27, 2004. Why then? Put it this way: It wasn't Matin's idea to get arrested! The Republican National Convention was opening in NYC on the 30th.

By the summer of 2004, a large and growing percentage of New Yorkers understood that 9/11 and Truth could be found together but not in any official capacity, and they had become increasingly angry -- and increasingly vocal -- about the fact that the Republicans were holding their quadrennial national party in the heart of the city they had allowed to be attacked.

Many very angry people felt that the Republicans were using the wreckage of Ground Zero as a political prop, saying to America "Vote For US, because we can make sure nothing like this ever happens again!"

It was (and continues to be) the most grotesque protection racket in the sorry history of mankind. For some reason the key question, the only relevant question -- never arose: "If you -- Bush, Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld, Rice -- if you are so interested in protecting us, why did you allow us to be attacked in the first place?"

And feelings on the streets of NY were getting more and more along the lines of "How DARE you Republicans party in the city you allowed to be attacked?" 'Twas a heartbreaking question to be sure.

But then all of a sudden Matin Siraj was arrested and the Yellow Elephants swept into town and instead of "How dare you party here?" the tables were turned and the elephants were able to stare down the truth-tellers and huff, "How dare YOU protest against our tough response to terror, when there are terrorists among you?

Stolar argued before sentencing that Matin’s prison term should not exceed 10 years.

Insanity! Matin Siraj should not be going to prison at all! And his family should certainly be released immediately!!

Perhaps some people would argue that Osama Eldawoody's sentence should not exceed 10 years, but I would argue for the whole thirty!.

Good luck to Martin Stolnar and Matin Siraj with the appeal, and best wishes to the entire Siraj family. May truth, justice, and the virtue formerly known as "the American way" triumph in this case, for once. Please.

~~~

See also: Becky Akers with Scott Horton on AntiWar Radio | Becky Akers: When The Devil Creates A Devil | Martin Stolar with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! | Previous posts on this subject

===

fourth in a series

Shrub Shuffles The Deck

According to a very interesting article at MSNBC via Financial Times, we are in the midst of a rearrangement of toadies and manipulators which comes in the wake of the resignation aka firing of the notorious war criminal and former secretary of "defense", Donald H. Rumsfeld (aka Dumsfeld), and this rearrangement includes moving Doctor Death Squad from Director of National Intelligence to the State Department to work [ahem] under Condoleeza Rice.

It could be that FT is connecting dots that don't connect, but then again it's entirely possible that somebody has inside sources. The point is: any way you slice it, it sounds awful:

Concern as spy chief quits to join Rice

John Negroponte's abrupt shift from being the first US director of national intelligence to number two at the State Department reflects continued troubles in the intelligence community and a further concentration of power around Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state.

Analysts see the return of the career diplomat to the State Department as part of a broader and somewhat confused reshuffle of the Bush administration that began with the sacking of Donald Rumsfeld as defence secretary and has Iraq and the wider Middle East as its focus.

It's lovely how they do things, isn't it? The so-called president has been trained to see every single thing in terms of Iraq and the surrounding region, so that the Middle East -- al-Q'Aeda -- Terrorism -- Muslims -- are all and everything. A curious tunnel vision which sees lone losers like Derrick Shareef and African tribal leaders as part of a single amorphous and mysterious group against which serious force is not only required but unquestionably so. Arggggh!

Mr Negroponte's expected replacement by a retired admiral, Mike McConnell, would also mean that key intelligence posts would all be filled by active or former military personnel – an issue of concern to civilians in the community.

Right! And also, why the admirals all of a sudden? Did the so-called president find out the Army has had enough of him?

Officials said President George W. Bush would announce the changes on Friday, possibly including his nomination of Zalmay Khalilzad, ambassador to Baghdad, as the new US envoy to the UN.

I can hardly wait. So many savory pasts on these names, it almost makes you want to weep.

OK, strike the "almost".

There was also speculation on Thursday night that Ryan Crocker, US ambassador to Pakistan, would replace Mr Khalilzad in Baghdad, and that David Petraeus would replace George Casey, the senior US general in Iraq. Gen Petraeus's appointment would be taken as a signal that the US military could change course in Iraq to emphasise a "hearts and minds" approach, designed to isolate the insurgents and reduce support for sectarian groups.

Where was this sort of idea four years ago? All they could think of was bombing and bombing and seeing whether they could get Saddam to hit back even once. And now ... now they want to try to win the "hearts and minds"? Good luck!

Of course we do know how they win hearts and minds, don't we?

According to leaks put out by Reuters and ABC on Thursday night, Mr Bush is also expected to replace John Abizaid with Admiral William Fallon as head of central command, which oversees the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

With a week to go before Mr Bush is expected to announce his "new way forward in Iraq", the president spoke on Thursday for nearly two hours by video conference with Nouri al-Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister.

Less than two years ago, Mr Negroponte was elevated to co-ordinate all 16 distinct spy agencies following the 9/11 commission probe into the intelligence failures surrounding al-Qaeda's attacks. However, former intelligence officials say that the overhaul only succeeded in creating another layer of bureaucracy with inadequate powers.

"Inadequate powers"?

So they didn't let little Johnny set up Death Squads after all?

Pity!

Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst who has accused the Bush administration of ignoring the agency's findings before invading Iraq, said Mr Negroponte had been unfairly criticised by some in Congress and that he did not have enough control over the defence department's intelligence operations.

Reuel Gerecht, a former CIA officer and a critic of the agency, called the creation of the director of national intelligence (DNI) a "lame idea".

"It has only made an overstaffed intelligence establishment even fatter," he said.

Another former CIA operative who asked not to be named said Mr Negroponte had never wanted the job and had clashed with Mr Rumsfeld, who controlled more than 80 per cent of the intelligence budget. "Negroponte gave in," he said.

I laugh, but only in self-defence. This is serious stuff. Dumsfeld's militarization of intelligence is going to be a problem one time or another. Har de har.

Tensions between the DNI and the Pentagon may ease with the replacement of Mr Rumsfeld by Robert Gates, a former CIA director who has said he wants to yield important Pentagon intelligence activities.

Mr Gates is expected to appoint Lt-Gen James Clapper, who had fallen out of favour with Mr Rumsfeld, as his top intelligence official.

Former intelligence officials said Mr Negroponte was tired of bureaucratic turf wars and wanted to return to his diplomatic career.

Mr McConnell, a former head of the National Security Agency, is tipped to leave his consulting job to replace Mr Negroponte.

And more ... curiouser and curiouser ...

Spin-Meisters Rotate The Phony War

TIME Magazine convened a panel of authors for a piece that seems to have a clear ulterior motive -- to "legitimize" The Phony War.

Thomas Ricks (Fiasco), Bob Woodward (State of Denial), Michael Gordon and Lieut. General Bernard Trainor (Cobra II), Ron Suskind (The One Percent Doctrine) and Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower) spoke with TIME's Steve Koepp and Mark Thompson for something called "The Real War", an "analysis" which is itself far short on reality.

But then it was never intended to be realistic. The subtitle gives away the agenda on the spot:

"What led to so many post-9/11 fumbles? A group of intrepid authors gives us answers"

It wasn't "fumbles", guys. This was it! This is what they wanted to do!!

I think my question is more interesting: Can we find even one among these six distinguished authors who is willing to say so? Hah!

In any event ... Here, for your amusement and/or edification, quotes from the article, remarks from a nearly frozen blogger, and a running scoreboard. (On each question, panelists may earn three points for telling the truth, or lose five for spinning.)

TIME: In hindsight, why did we go to war in Iraq? What do you think the real reasons were?

TRAINOR: After 9/11 the country was in shock, including the President. And he looks at this country — wide-open borders and a free style of life, how do you protect against another catastrophic attack? I think the idea came about that you try to get the archer before he fires the arrow. Better yet, you get the guy who supplies the archer. O.K., that being the case, whom can you operate against? Well, it's not very likely you can do much about North Korea or Iran. But Iraq is an easy target, and if you go against Iraq, you're not only eliminating that guy, but you're also sending a signal to all the troublemakers of the world that you don't mess with Hopalong Cassidy.

This answer from TRAINOR earns a good solid negative five, as we know that Bush had plans to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein even before he received the Republican nomination, way back in a nearly bygone era -- the summer of 2000. Since 9/11 the Bush administration has shown no concern about how to protect our country from another attack. We know this not only because our ports have never been secured but even more important: there's never been an effort to secure them properly. There has been an effort to outsource port security to a foreign country, but that's another story. And even more significantly, we know it because the Bush administration, and especially Bush himself, have done everything in their power to impede investigation of the events of that day.

TIME gets some of the others talking by spinning towards a more comfortable meme.

TIME: What about the sense of unfinished business on the part of the Bush family?

SUSKIND: From the first National Security Council meeting in 2001, in January, there was ardor. Now some people say it wasn't a war plan. But what's indisputable is that there was discussion about [how] the primary mission of U.S. policy would be to oust Saddam Hussein. It became the stuff of action plans from the very start. In terms of [Donald] Rumsfeld and [Dick] Cheney, there's a sense of regret that it wasn't done before. The mission was Iraq from the beginning.

RICKS: I totally disagree with you. I don't think that there was a Bush Administration plan to invade Iraq at the time they came into office. For the first year, they were more or less focused on improving containment: How do we sharpen policy against Iraq? It wasn't until 9/11 that you get that really sharp break where they say, O.K., let's invade this place.

WRIGHT: They saw this as a political opportunity that would never come around again. If they wanted to put that plan into action, this was the moment. There wasn't going to be another one.

Score three points each for for SUSKIND ("The mission was Iraq from the beginning.") and WRIGHT ("They saw this as a political opportunity") and minus five for RICKS ("It wasn't until 9/11 that you get that really sharp break where they say, O.K., let's invade this place.")

This particular argument from RICKS proves nothing, of course, and is therefore all spin. They didn't have the political room to maneuver before 9/11. That's the whole point. That's what 9/11 was about ... er ... that's one of the things that 9/11 was about. So RICKS joins TRAINOR at -5; SUSKIND and WRIGHT have +3 each.

RICKS -5
TRAINOR -5
GORDON 0
WOODWARD 0
SUSKIND 3
WRIGHT 3

Notice how TIME puts the cart before the horse on the next question:

TIME: Did the failure to capture Osama bin Laden play a role in the decision to go to war?

GORDON: I was at Tora Bora at that point, in December '01. The desire to have a war plan for Iraq has already been telegraphed to [General] Tommy Franks at Centcom. Franks is actually struggling with Tora Bora, with his unhappiness with the results in Afghanistan, just as he is on the eve of returning for a very important meeting at Crawford with the President. I think they made a very quick decision that in principle Iraq was next on the agenda.

WRIGHT: Al-Qaeda essentially was dead after December 2001. The war on terror, you know, had succeeded. [If we had] captured the leaders, I think people would've felt a sense of finality and might not have had that impulse to roll into Iraq. I'm not sure [the Administration] would have had the public support.

Truth points for both GORDON and WRIGHT on this one. Kudos to WRIGHT who is clearly trying to counter TIME's spin; his points are particularly well-deserved.

RICKS -5
TRAINOR -5
WOODWARD 0
SUSKIND 3
GORDON 3
WRIGHT 6

TIME: Given the strategic importance of the Middle East, why hasn't U.S. intelligence about the region been better?

WRIGHT: Because we haven't hired the people that have the skills to understand that region. There's an outright prejudice against people who natively speak Arabic, Pashtu, Dari. They are invited not to apply. The FBI says that there are 25 Arabic speakers [in the FBI], but they send them off to [class] for nine weeks, and at the end of that time they can order breakfast in Arabic. But they cannot interrogate a suspect. They don't know anything about the culture.

But this is completely unnecessary. We have a country that's full of immigrant groups that represent those areas. One thing that every American should be more aware of is, it's not the contact-lens solution that we surrender at the airport that makes [us] safer. It's the fact that our Muslim and Arab communities are much more integrated into American life than they are elsewhere, especially in Europe.

WOODWARD: What is central is that before we went into Iraq in March of 2003, somebody should have just asked the basic questions, Do we know anything about this country? Do we have intelligence sources? Do we have open sources? The level of ignorance was pathetic.

RICKS: A lot of people were saying that this is going to be harder than you think. But that advice was systematically excluded. It was aggressively not welcome in the inner circle.

GORDON: I went through rather laboriously this Future of Iraq study by the State Department, which was on a CD. I thought it was an extremely thin document. I didn't think it was anything remotely like a plan for the postwar.

This is question is too easy but the answers all come out on the plus side.

TRAINOR -5
RICKS -2
WOODWARD 3
SUSKIND 3
GORDON 6
WRIGHT 9

TIME: On the eve of the war, which of you believed that we would go in and find no WMD? Two out of six. Why did you feel that way, Tom?

RICKS: I thought that at most they would find some old mustard gas buried out in the '91 war that somebody had forgotten about. I remember asking the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs about a week before the invasion, "You don't know where the stuff is, do you?" And he said, "No, but I'm confident the Iraqis will tell us."

SUSKIND: I was sitting with [former Treasury Secretary] Paul O'Neill on the balcony of his condominium at the Watergate a week before the invasion, and he said two things. One is, "Trust me, they haven't thought this through." And second is, "I don't believe there is any evidence, any objective sources to credit as evidence in terms of WMD."

WOODWARD: I talked to people who said, The evidence is much skimpier than what they are saying. And we played around with writing a story about this and did not, and it's one of my regrets. We should've all been much more aggressive. It's an intelligence failure, it's a policy failure, it is a journalistic failure. Tom Ricks and I work at the same newspaper. If you had these doubts, which I was not aware of contemporaneously, we should have found some way to get out and say, "What do we really know here?" We can and should at least put the burden on ourselves to be one step ahead on this, and we were not.

What have we here? Points for RICKS and SUSKIND, with WOODWARD trying to bore in on some of the action? Oh, we should have done this, we should have done that; but you didn't, did you?

Sorry. Nothing for Mr. WOODWARD on this one.

TRAINOR -5
RICKS 1
WOODWARD 3
SUSKIND 6
GORDON 6
WRIGHT 9

TIME: Bob, you yourself got some criticism for your first two books for allegedly being too sympathetic to the Bush Administration. But State of Denial is a very tough look at the situation now. Would you say that you are overcompensating?

WOODWARD: You know, the books speak for themselves, and it was the New York Times that on the second volume ran two front-page stories saying that the book had jolted the White House. My best recollection is the White House is not jolted with something that is a sympathetic portrait.

TRAINOR: We have to make a distinction when you talk about WMD. We were concerned in terms of operations and tactics about chemicals and biologicals, but not nuclear.

GORDON: The military very much had the expectation that not only would it find WMD but it would encounter the use of WMD. One reason the Marines maneuvered the way they did around the battlefield was to stay outside the range of the artillery that they were told was chemical artillery.

RICKS: It's also important to remember though that Dick Cheney in August 2002 got up at the VFW Convention in Nashville and said, "There is no doubt." Which is to say 100% certainty, and I think that had enormous influence inside the military, inside the intelligence community and even to an extent on journalists. When the Vice President says, "I know for a fact," a lot of people in the military said, "He must know something that I don't know."

SUSKIND: And that evidence would often not be available. This is what Cheney said over and over, that evidence as we have defined it up to now may be too high a bar. When someone offers a doubt, Cheney slaps them down.

TRAINOR: I think Cheney was kind of the Cardinal Richelieu in this whole thing. And he was feeding a predisposition that the President had.

Notice how nobody answered the question? There's no score for anybody. TRAINOR narrowly escaped a penalty for attempting to misdirect the discussion.

TRAINOR -5
RICKS 1
WOODWARD 3
SUSKIND 6
GORDON 6
WRIGHT 9

TIME: When it comes to war planning, military commanders are told to prepare for the worst. Why was hope such an important part of the tool kit this time?

GORDON: Well, they in fact prepared for the worst. But they were very much fighting the last war. I mean, they were worried the oil fields would be set on fire. Why? Because Saddam had set the Kuwaiti oil fields on fire. So they entered the situation prepared for all the things that didn't happen and not the things that did.

RICKS: A phrase that came to haunt me in the research for my book was [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz's "hard to imagine." It turned out that, yeah, it was the imagination. Wolfowitz said it was hard to imagine that you'd need that many more troops for an occupation than for an invasion.

WOODWARD: I think it's impossible to overemphasize the role of Rumsfeld in all of this. The more you look at it, you discover that even some rather independent-minded, smart people didn't realize they were being co-opted into the vision he had of this war.

SUSKIND: It was a sales job — it wasn't an analysis job. There was so much emphasis on how to sell it that they ended up essentially not doing the basic due diligence.

GORDON: There is another factor here we need to recognize, which is that the Administration took office with a very set view on nation building. One month before the war, Rumsfeld gave a speech in New York City called "Beyond Nation Building." We weren't going to go in with lots of troops. We weren't going to take over responsibility for administering the country, because this would create an unhealthy dependence on the part of that population. Basically, they were going to practice a sort of tough-love philosophy of postwar management. So it wasn't that they lacked a plan. It was that they had a bad plan. And they looked to Afghanistan, where they had applied this, and they mistakenly saw what happened in Afghanistan as a validation of this philosophy.

Points for SUSKIND. Deductions for everybody else on this one. Only one deduction for GORDON, even though he spoke twice. 'Tis the season.

TRAINOR -5
RICKS -4
WOODWARD -2
GORDON 1
WRIGHT 9
SUSKIND 9

TIME: Bob, you have experience covering several administrations. How is this one different in terms of decision making?

WOODWARD: You can't help but look back at Clinton's famous late nights at the dorm when he would pick through details and ask questions and keep people well past midnight. It probably wouldn't have hurt to have had a little bit of that here at the table. And if you look at Bush, he's kind of, you know, meeting starts at 9, the meeting is over at 10. That's it.

Ka-CHING! The meetings are only about informing others of decisions that have already been made. It's tough to justify awarding WOODWARD points for a question on which the others were excluded, but there it is.

TRAINOR -5
RICKS -4
GORDON 1
WOODWARD 1
WRIGHT 9
SUSKIND 9

TIME: Once the Saddam statue fell, what was the first inkling you had that something was going astray?

WRIGHT: I was teaching these young journalists in Saudi Arabia when the war happened. And I had been watching the war on Fox and al-Jazeera. The war on Fox was one of "America's liberation." And on al-Jazeera, it was all a narrative of humiliation and surrender. They covered the end of the war with a documentary about the Ku Klux Klan, followed by a documentary about Hiroshima.

GORDON: In April 2003 I was with the 2nd Brigade Combat Team. They were due to go home, because on April 16, 2003, Tommy Franks had flown to Baghdad and given his commanders instructions to prepare to withdraw all but one division�plus by September 2003. Bush had declared an end to major combat operations. So they thought they were going home. A guy I was living with said goodbye to me and said he was flying back. Then I woke up the next morning, and he was still there. And I said, "What happened?" He said, "I went out to the tarmac, they turned me around. We're not going home."

WRIGHT doesn't come near answering the question, and his use of the phrase "the end of the war" is grounds for a five-point penalty; GORDON scores three for "We're not going home".

TRAINOR -5
RICKS -4
WOODWARD 1
GORDON 4
WRIGHT 4
SUSKIND 9

TIME: Where there was a sense that things weren't working, why did that not filter up?

RICKS: Because I think in the fall of 2003, when it was clear there was an insurgency emerging, the U.S. military did what it knew how to do, which is battalion- or brigade-size operations, and because there was no strategic oversight. Division commanders sort of operated on their own, and they were told, Get your area of operations quiet. Well, what's the fastest way to get your area of operations quiet? It's to ship out military-age males and get them off your area of operations. If they're at Abu Ghraib, they're not your problem anymore. They are somebody else's problem.

SUSKIND: Does anyone here have any specific evidence of the President being involved directly, being presented with choices and consequences about the disbanding of the Iraqi army?

WOODWARD: No, it didn't happen. In fact, what they did is contrary to the briefings [Bush] received before the war.

RICKS: That's actually one of the things in the books — I was struck by the absence of the President. He should be a central figure in decision making. And again and again, there's never any one key meeting. For example, the actual decision to go to war doesn't seem to ever have been [made at] a meeting in which people formally sat down and said, "Do we all agree?"

SUSKIND: Often the briefing ends with the Vice President — the let's-get-down-to-brass-tacks briefing. How can a President not be involved in decisions upon which so many lives depend? That's an enormous question here. At day's end, history will point to the character of the President. That's the way it boils down.

WOODWARD: But there's an intervening moment, which is the moment we are living in now. And that is the question of his moral authority as a leader. And he teeters on the edge, quite frankly, of losing that moral authority. I've discussed this with him, years back, about a President being the voice of realism. And in this whole story, he's been the cheerleader.

I think there's something important we haven't talked about, which is, What about the troops over there in Iraq? What about the people who are executing this policy? They really are not being told what they are doing. There is this resilience on one hand and at the same time a kind of despair that is very haunting when you hear it from somebody on the ground. As a country, we owe them everything, but they have not got it. It is almost a war without a home front. Taxes are down, everyone's buying, Christmas is coming. There is a sense almost that we're not at war. I can't explain that phenomenon, but I find it deeply troubling.

TRAINOR: I think your use of the term despair is much too strong. I think what they are sensing out there is a sense of frustration. They are all very well trained and very well motivated. I mean, it's amazing that the morale is as high as it is.

WOODWARD: Sometimes despair is private.

There's a five-point penalty for TRAINOR on his objection to the word "despair"; but points to WOODWARD, SUSKIND and RICKS for their contributions here, and the final scores are:

TRAINOR -10
RICKS -1
GORDON 4
WRIGHT 4
WOODWARD 4
SUSKIND 12

And the final decision:

Lieut. General Bernard TRAINOR spins 'em almost as well as the "moderators" from TIME and will be invited back early and often. RICKS may get a phone call once in a while; GORDON, WRIGHT and/or WOODWARD could be brought back to play the token (soft) (and/or faux) opposition, if we ever need more of that again. And please tell Mr. SUSKIND we wish him well with his book. Then get him out of here as fast as you can.

If I had to choose one of the books mentioned here, it would be "The One Percent Doctrine" by Ron Suskind.

Portrait of the Young Journalist as a Poet

There's a very interesting interview with Larisa Alexandrovna, and a few samples of her poetry, in Volume 6 of Heyoka Magazine. It's too good to cut, and too long to mirror. So please go read it.

Larisa's latest piece at Huffington Post is, like all her best work, overflowing with passion. I think you should read that, too.

While we're reading Larisa, her most recent investigative piece was published at Raw Story on Tuesday. In case you missed it, here's a link: Intelligence sources question Gates' independence from Cheney, Rumsfeld

Dumsfeld And Others Accused Of Torture

Outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other American officials have been named in a lawsuit filed in Germany earlier this week, which alleges that they bear responsibility for torture committed at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. A preliminary hearing was held in Berlin on Tuesday, details of which have been difficult to find, especially in the USA. How surprising!

Fortunately, more comprehensive reports have been published elsewhere.

From Business Day (South Africa): Former US inmates target Rumsfeld in war crimes suit:

Eleven former prisoners of the US armed forces [Tuesday] filed a lawsuit in Germany calling for former US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and other American officials to be investigated for war crimes.

Backed by human rights groups, the 11 say they were tortured at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and the US prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba on the orders of Rumsfeld and other top members of US President George Bush’s administration.

From The Berlin Paper: Lawyers meet in movie theaters to push for Rumsfeld war crimes suit

Lawyers met Tuesday in Mitte’s Babylon theater [shown in the photo above: the marquee reads "Human Rights Against Rumsfeld"] to announce and explain their lawsuit against outgoing US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials whom they accuse of committing war crimes.

The lawsuit was organized by Wolfgang Kaleck from the Center for Institutional Rights (CCR); the German lawyers’ group “Republikanische Anwälteverein” (RAV); and the Paris-based Federation Internationale des Ligues des Droits de l’Hommes (FIDH). The suit asks the German Federal Prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe to investigate whether Rumsfeld, attorney general Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet, and Bush administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee committed war crimes in authorizing the use of torture.

For five hours on Monday, lawyers read the text of their lawsuit to the public at Friedrichshain movie theater Kino International before filing court papers on Tuesday in Karlsruhe.

This suit differs from a similar brief filed last year in that it lists 12 individuals, rather than four, as having been tortured and abused by US officials. In both instances, the cases were cobbled together using Pentagon memos, reports from human rights groups, newspaper articles, and eyewitness testimonies.

But what bolsters their argument this time is former brigadier general Janis Karpinski’s offer to testify on their behalf.

By far the most detailed English-language report of the hearing that I have been able to find is Rumsfeld faces lawsuit for alleged war crimes in Iraq, written by Roger Boyes in Berlin, and published by Times Online (UK). Boyes' report includes the following:

[Janis Karpinski], the former head of Abu Ghraib jail [...] gave a graphic account of conditions in the US detention centre as part of an attempt to put Donald Rumsfeld in the dock for allegedly aiding and abetting war crimes in Iraq.
...
“When I arrived in 2003, the prison held under 500 Iraqis, but, within a month, after a visit by military intelligence, that number had jumped to 3,000,” said Mrs Karpinski.

“Within a further month, the prison was holding 7,800. There was no release procedure in place and most did not know why they were being held.”
...
She accused Mr Rumsfeld [Tuesday] of authorising the use of torture at the prison and effectively wresting the jail out of her control.

At a public hearing in Berlin today - to press home the prosecution case against Mr Rumsfeld - the former governor described how a senior military intelligence officer, Major General Geoffrey Miller, took command over the prison. He was, according to the case presented to a public hearing today, acting on the orders of Mr Rumsfeld to secure better and quicker intelligence from captured Iraqis.

“He simply said: ’I order you to hand over Abu Ghraib to me’,” recalled the former governor, who was disciplined and demoted after photographs of prisoner abuse were made public.

Mrs. Karpinski was interviewed on Monday by the German paper Tagesspiegel, but (as far as I can tell) it has only been published in German. My attempts to translate the text into English using software have produced illegible results, so I'll spare you the details.

If you any know enough German to translate this web page, or if you know of any software capable of generating a reasonable translation, please contact me, either via email or in comments.

Slanted Headline Of The Night

Last night I compiled a list of the most current headlines on the Rumsfeld War Crimes suit. Please read the following headlines carefully. Can you spot the most slanted headline of them all?

People's Daily Online, China: Rumsfeld faces war crime lawsuit in Germany

Turkish Press, MI: Pentagon: Legal complaint against Rumsfeld unfounded

MSNBC: Rumsfeld target of war crimes-related lawsuit

Guardian Unlimited: War Crimes Probe Sought For Rumsfeld

Belleville News-Democrat: Civil liberties groups push for war-crimes investigation of Rumsfeld

AND, South Africa: Group Files Suit In Germany Against Rumsfeld For War Crimes

Contra Costa Times, CA: Civil liberties groups push for war-crimes investigation of Rumsfeld

Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, GA: Civil liberties groups push for war-crimes investigation of Rumsfeld

KFMB, CA: War Crimes Probe Sought for Rumsfeld

The State, SC: Civil liberties groups push for war-crimes investigation of Rumsfeld

ProgressiveU.org, CA: Rumsfeld charged with War Crimes?

Canada.com: Group seeks war crimes probe by Germany of Rumsfeld

Kansas City Star, MO: Civil liberties groups push for war-crimes investigation of Rumsfeld

Newsday, NY: War Crimes Probe Sought for Rumsfeld

Bradenton Herald: Civil liberties groups push for war-crimes investigation of Rumsfeld

Monterey County Herald, CA: Civil liberties groups push for war-crimes investigation of Rumsfeld

Myrtle Beach Sun News, SC: Civil liberties groups push for war-crimes investigation of Rumsfeld

Kentucky.com: Civil liberties groups push for war-crimes investigation of Rumsfeld

San Luis Obisbo Tribune, CA: Civil liberties groups push for war-crimes investigation of Rumsfeld

Times of India: Lawsuit filed in Germany against Rumsfeld

Centre Daily Times, PA: Civil liberties groups push for war-crimes investigation of Rumsfeld

Biloxi Sun Herald: Civil liberties groups push for war-crimes investigation of Rumsfeld

Jurist: Rumsfeld war crimes complaint filed in Germany

New York Times: German Prosecutor Asked to Investigate Rumsfeld

Monsters and Critics, UK: Pentagon: Legal complaint against Rumsfeld unfounded

BBC News: Rumsfeld faces German legal test

CTV, Canada: Group sues to have Rumsfeld investigated

Toronto Star: US officials face war crimes suit

RAW STORY: Legal complaint against Rumsfeld unfounded

What's going on here?

It is (or should be) common knowledge that the Pentagon sees lying to the enemy as a legitimate tactic. It's quite clear that it considers the American public its enemy. Put two and two together. Why would RAW STORY use the Pentagon's denial for a headline? Even worse, why would it do so without even attributing the denial to the Pentagon? IMO, in this case, the news site that calls itself a "rational alternative" is showing itself to be neither.

We expect RAW STORY to be better than most other news sources. Are our expectations unrealistic? And ... I hate to ask this, but ... is it more realistic to expect them to be among the worst?

These are uncomfortable questions. Unfortunately I do not know the answers. But as usual I welcome your opinions.

P.S. Hopefully I will be back soon with some details of the proceedings in the German courtroom.