| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2004 8:41 pm Post subject: Cheney's Staff Focus of Ambassador Wilson (Valerie Plame) Pr |
| Cheney's Staff Focus of Ambassador Wilson (Valerie Plame) Probe
Cheney's Staff Focus of Probe
http://www.insightmag.com/news/2004/02/17/National/Cheneys.Staff.Focus.Of.Probe-598606.shtml
Posted Feb. 5, 2004
By Richard Sale
Published: Tuesday, February 17, 2004
Federal law-enforcement officials said that they have developed hard evidence of possible criminal misconduct by two employees of Vice President Dick Cheney's office related to the unlawful exposure of a CIA officer's identity last year. The investigation, which is continuing, could lead to indictments, a Justice Department official said.
According to these sources, John Hannah and Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, were the two Cheney employees. "We believe that Hannah was the major player in this," one federal law-enforcement officer said. Calls to the vice president's office were not returned, nor did Hannah and Libby return calls.
The strategy of the FBI is to make clear to Hannah "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" as a way to pressure him to name superiors, one federal law-enforcement official said.
The case centers on Valerie Plame, a CIA operative then working for the weapons of mass destruction division, and her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who served as ambassador to Gabon and as a senior U.S. diplomat in Baghdad in the early 1990s. Under President Bill Clinton, he was head of African affairs until he retired in 1998, according to press accounts.
Wilson was sent by the Bush administration in March 2002 to check on an allegation made by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address the previous winter that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from the nation of Niger. Wilson returned with a report that said the claim was "highly doubtful."
On June 12, Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus revealed that an unnamed diplomat had "given a negative report" on the claim and then, on July 6, as the Bush administration was widely accused of manipulating intelligence to get American public opinion behind a war with Iraq, Wilson published an op-ed piece in the Post in which he accused the Bush administration of "misrepresenting the facts." His piece also asked, "What else are they lying about?"
According to one administration official, "The White House was really pissed, and began to contact six journalists in order to plant stories to discredit Wilson," according to the New York Times and other accounts.
As Pincus said in a Sept. 29 radio broadcast, "The reason for putting out the story about Wilson's wife working for the CIA was to undermine the credibility of [Wilson's] mission for the agency in Niger. Wilson, as the last top diplomat in Iraq at the time of the Gulf War, had credibility beyond his knowledge of Africa, which was his specialty. So his going to Niger to check the allegation that Iraq had sought uranium there and returning to say he had no confirmation was considered very credible."
Eight days later, columnist Robert Novak wrote a column in which he named Wilson's wife and revealed she was "an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction." Since Plame was working undercover, it exposed her and, in the opinion of some, ruined her usefulness and her career. It also violated a 1982 law that prohibits revealing the identity of U.S. intelligence agents.
On Oct. 7, Bush said that unauthorized disclosure of an undercover CIA officer's identity was "a criminal matter" and the Justice Department had begun its investigation into the source of the leak.
Richard Sale is an intelligence correspondent for UPI, a sister wire service of Insight magazine. | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2004 2:56 am Post subject: this is GOOD! |
| Subj: this is GOOD!
Date: 2/5/2004 6:31:11 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: TOOL
John Hannah and Scooter Libby are about to be busted for exposing Valarie Plame!
Some background on Hannah
Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two “U.S. governmental recipients” for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, “defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed”; the info was then reported to, among others, “appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.” The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a “principal point of contact” for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney’s staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3660169/ | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2004 4:26 am Post subject: Re: this is GOOD! |
| | Alpha wrote: | Subj: this is GOOD!
Date: 2/5/2004 6:31:11 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: TOOL
John Hannah and Scooter Libby are about to be busted for exposing Valarie Plame!
Some background on Hannah
Cheney’s office has denied that the veep bypassed U.S. intelligence agencies to get intel reports from the INC. But a June 2002 memo written by INC lobbyist Entifadh Qunbar to a U.S. Senate committee lists John Hannah, a senior national-security aide on Cheney’s staff, as one of two “U.S. governmental recipients” for reports generated by an intelligence program being run by the INC and which was then being funded by the State Department. Under the program, “defectors, reports and raw intelligence are cultivated and analyzed”; the info was then reported to, among others, “appropriate governmental, non-governmental and international agencies.” The memo not only describes Cheney aide Hannah as a “principal point of contact” for the program, it even provides his direct White House telephone number. The only other U.S. official named as directly receiving the INC intel is William Luti, a former military adviser to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich who, after working on Cheney’s staff early in the Bush administration, shifted to the Pentagon, where he oversaw a secretive Iraq war-planning unit called the Office of Special Plans.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3660169/ |
Subj: The (Neocon) Lie Factory
Date: 1/9/04 5:21:34 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net
To: hectorpv@comcast.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)
Friends,
The (Neocon) Lie Factory
This is an excellent article by Jason Vest and Robert Dreyfus discussing how the neocons took over Defense Department intelligence and used it to propagandize for war against Iraq, especially with the creation of the Office of Special Plans. Thus neocon dominance went far beyond the existence of a few leading individuals, such as Wolfowitz, Feith, or Perle. Rather, the leading neocons brought in other members of their ilk and concomitantly purged those career officials who were resistant to their war mission. All the neocons worked together to promote the war. "’It was organized like a machine," she [Karen Kwiatkowski] says. ‘The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission.’" A close analogy was the success of the old Soviet-directed Communists to take over liberal and leftist organizations (and some governments) by virtue of their discipline and organization. The neocons, however, achieve greater success without the external, formal discipline of the Communist Party. They seem to have innate talent here. But it also might be added that the neocons are able to act more openly—in part because to oppose to them brings on the lethal charge of "anti-Semite," which is far more deadly than "red-baiter."
_________________________
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html
MotherJones.com / News / Feature
The Lie Factory
Robert Dreyfuss, Jason Vest. Mother Jones. San Francisco: Jan/Feb 2004. Vol. 29, Iss. 1; pg. 34
Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secret Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq. Here is the inside story for how they pushed disinformation and bogus intelligence and led the nation to war. BY ROBERT DREYFUSS & VEST
IT'S A CRISP FALL DAY IN WESTERN VIRGINIA, a hundred miles from Washington, D.C., and a breeze is rustling the red and gold leaves of the Shenandoah hills. On the weather-beaten wood porch of a ramshackle 90-year-old farmhouse, at the end of a winding dirt-and-gravel road, Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski is perched on a plastic chair, wearing shorts, a purple sweatshirt, and muddy sneakers. Two scrawny dogs and a lone cat are on the prowl, and tne air is filled with swarms
So far, she says, no investigators have come knocking. Not from the Central Intelligence Agency, which conducted an internal inquiry into intelligence on Iraq, not from the congressional intelligence committees, not from the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. All of those bodies are ostensibly looking into the Bush administration's prewar Iraq intelligence, amid charges that the White House and the Pentagon exaggerated, distorted, or just plain lied about Iraq's links to Al Qaeda terrorists and its possession of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. In her hands, Kwiatkowski holds several pieces of the puzzle. Yet she, along with a score of other career officers recently retired or shuffled off to other jobs, has not been approached by anyone.
Kwiatkowski, 43, a now-retired Air Force officer who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia (NESA) unit in the year before the invasion of Iraq, observed how the Pentagon's Iraq war-planning unit manufactured scare stories about Iraq's weapons and ties to terrorists. "It wasn't intelligence-it was propaganda," she says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials-including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February-that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.
Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews-some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity-exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.
SIX MONTHS AFTER THE END of major combat in Iraq, the United States had spent $300 million trying to find banned weapons in Iraq, and President Bush was seeking $600 million more to extend the search. Not found were Iraq's Scuds and other long-range missiles, thousands of barrels and tons of anthrax and botulism stock, sarin and VX nerve agents, mustard gas, biological and chemical munitions, mobile labs for producing biological weapons, and any and all evidence of a reconstituted nuclear-arms program, all of which had been repeatedly cited as justification for the war. Also missing was evidence of Iraqi collaboration with Al Qaeda.
The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath of office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised, according to one of the participants in the meeting-and officials all the way down the line started to get the message, long before 9/11. Indeed, the Bush team at the Pentagon hadn't even been formally installed before Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense, and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, began putting together what would become the vanguard for regime change in Iraq.
Both Wolfowitz and Feith have deep roots in the neoconservative movement. One of the most influential Washington neoconservatives in the foreign-policy establishment during the Republicans' wilderness years of the 1990s, Wolfowitz has long held that not taking Baghdad in 1991 was a grievous mistake. He and others now prominent in the administration said so repeatedly over the past decade in a slew of letters and policy papers from neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Feith, a former aide to Richard Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s and an activist in far-right Zionist circles, held the view that there was no difference between U.S. and Israeli security policy and that the best way to secure both countries' future was to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem not by serving as a broker, but with the United States as a force for "regime change" in the region.
Called in to help organize the Iraq war-planning team was a longtime Pentagon official, Harold Rhode, a specialist on Islam who speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Turkish, and Farsi. Though Feith would not be officially confirmed until July 2001, career military and civilian officials in NESA began to watch his office with concern after Rhode set up shop in Feith's office in early January. Rhode, seen by many veteran staffers as an ideological gadfly, was officially assigned to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, an in-house Pentagon think tank headed by fellow neocon Andrew Marshall. Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department's new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation. In one telling incident, Rhode accosted and harangued a visiting senior Arab diplomat, telling him that there would be no "bartering in the bazaar anymore.... You're going to have to sit up and pay attention when we say so."
Rhode refused to be interviewed for this story, saying cryptically, "Those who speak, pay."
According to insiders, Rhode worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren't sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Wolfowitz and Feith wanted. Rhode appeared to be "pulling people out of nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places to replace us with," says a former analyst. "They wanted nothing to do with the professional staff. And they wanted us the fuck out of there."
The unofficial, off-site recruitment office for Feith and Rhode was the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank whose 12th-floor conference room in Washington is named for the dean of neoconservative defense strategists, the late Albert Wohlstetter, an influential RAND analyst and University of Chicago mathematician. Headquartered at AEI is Richard Perle, Wohlstetter's prize protege, the godfather of the AEI-Defense Department nexus of neoconservatives who was chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board. Rhode, along with Michael Rubin, a former AEI staffer who is also now at the Pentagon, was a ubiquitous presence at AEI conferences on Iraq over the past two years, and the two Pentagon officials seemed almost to be serving as stage managers for the AEI events, often sitting in the front row and speaking in stage whispers to panelists and AEI officials. Just after September 11, 2001, Feith and Rhode recruited David Wurmser, the director of Middle East studies for AEI, to serve as a Pentagon consultant.
Wurmser would be the founding participant of the unnamed, secret intelligence unit at the Pentagon, set up in Feith's office, which would be the nucleus of the Defense Department's Iraq disinformation campaign that was established within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington. While the CIA and other intelligence agencies concentrated on Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda as the culprit in the 9/11 attacks, Wolfowitz and Feith obsessively focused on Iraq. It was a theory that was discredited, even ridiculed, among intelligence professionals. Daniel Benjamin, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, was director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council in the late 1990s. "In 1998, we went through every piece of intelligence we could find to see if there was a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq," he says. "We came to the conclusion that our intelligence agencies had it right: There was no noteworthy relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. I know that for a fact." Indeed, that was the consensus among virtually all anti-terrorism specialists.
In short, Wurmser, backed by Feith and Rhode, set out to prove what didn't exist.
IN AN ADMINISTRATION devoted to the notion of "Feith-based intelligence," Wurmser was ideal. For years, he'd been a shrill ideologue, part of the minority crusade during the 1990s that was beating the drums for war against Iraq. Along with Perle and Feith, in 1996 Wurmser and his wife, Meyrav, wrote a provocative strategy paper for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm." It called on Israel to work with Jordan and Turkey to "contain, destabilize and roll back" various states in the region, overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, press Jordan to restore a scion of the Hashemite dynasty to the Iraqi throne, and, above all, launch military assaults against Lebanon and Syria as a "prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity."
In 1997, Wurmser wrote a column in the Wall Street Journal called "Iraq Needs a Revolution" and the next year co-signed a letter with Perle calling for all-out U.S. support of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group led by Ahmad Chalabi, in promoting an insurgency in Iraq. At AEI, Wurmser wrote Tyranny's Ally: America's Failure to Defeat Saddam Hussein, essentially a book-length version of "A Clean Break" that proposed an alliance between Jordan and the INC to redraw the map of the Middle East. Among the mentors cited by Wurmser in the book: Chalabi, Perle, and Feith.
The purpose of the unnamed intelligence unit, often described as a Pentagon "cell," was to scour reports from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other agencies to find nuggets of information linking Iraq, Al Qaeda, terrorism, and the existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In a controversial press briefing in October 2002, a year after Wurmser's unit was established, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged that a primary purpose of the unit was to cull factoids, which were then used to disparage, undermine, and contradict the CIA's reporting, which was far more cautious and nuanced than Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith wanted. Rumsfeld particularly enjoyed harassing the CIA staffer who briefed him every morning, using the type of data produced by the intelligence unit. "What I could do is say, 'Gee, what about this?'" Rumsfeld noted. "'Or what about that? Has somebody thought of this?'" Last June, when Feith was questioned on the same topic at a briefing, he acknowledged that the secret unit in fact looked at the connection between Iraq and terrorism, saying, "You can't rely on deterrence to deal with the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of state sponsors of terrorism because [of] the possibility that those state sponsors might employ chemical weapons or biological weapons by means of a terrorist organization proxy...."
Though Feith, in that briefing, described Wurmser's unit as an innocent project, "a global exercise" that was not meant to put pressure on other intelligence agencies or create skewed intelligence to fit preconceived policy notions, many other sources assert that it did exactly that. That the White House and the Pentagon put enormous pressure on the CIA to go along with its version of events has been widely reported, highlighted by visits to CIA headquarters by Vice President Cheney and Lewis Libby, his chief of staff. Led by Perle, the neocons seethed with contempt for the CIA. The CIA'S analysis, said Perle, "isn't worth the paper it's printed on." Standing in a crowded hallway during an AEI event, Perle added, "The CIA is status quo oriented. They don't want to take risks."
That became the mantra of the shadow agency within an agency.
Putting Wurmser in charge of the unit meant that it was being run by a pro-Iraq-war ideologue who'd spent years calling for a pre-emptive invasion of Baghdad and who was clearly predisposed to find what he wanted to see. Adding another layer of dubious quality to the endeavor was the man partnered with Wurmser, F. Michael Maloof. Maloof, a former aide to Perle in the 1980s Pentagon, was twice stripped of his high-level security clearances-once in late 2001 and again last spring, for various infractions. Maloof was also reportedly involved in a bizarre scheme to broker contacts between Iraqi officials and the Pentagon, channeled through Perle, in what one report called a "rogue [intelligence] operation" outside officiai CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency channels.
As the momentum for war began to build in early 2002, Wolfowitz and Feith beefed up the intelligence unit and created an Iraq war-planning unit in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia Affairs section, run by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Luti, under the rubric "Office of Special Plans," or OSP; the new unit's director was Abram N. Shulsky. By then, Wurmser had moved on to a post as senior adviser to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, yet another neocon, who was in charge of the State Department's disarmament, proliferation, and WMD office and was promoting the Iraq war strategy there. Shulsky's OSP, which incorporated the secret intelligence unit, took control, banishing veteran experts-including Joseph McMillan, James Russell, Larry Hanauer, and Marybeth McDevitt-who, despite years of service to NESA, either were shuffled off to other positions or retired. For the next year, Luti and Shulsky not only would oversee war plans but would act aggressively to shape the intelligence product received by the White House.
Both Luti and Shulsky were neoconservatives who were ideological soulmates of Wolfowitz and Feith. But Luti was more than that. He'd come to the Pentagon directly from the office of Vice President Cheney. That gave Luti, a recently retired, decorated Navy captain whose career ran from combat aviation to command of a helicopter assault ship, extra clout. Along with his colleague Colonel William Bruner, Luti had done a stint as an aide to Newt Gingrich in 1996 and, like Perle and Wolfowitz, was an acolyte of Wohlstetter's. "He makes Ollie North look like a moderate," says a NESA veteran.
Shulsky had been on the Washington scene since the mid-1970s. As a Senate intelligence committee staffer for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, he began to work with early neoconservatives like Perle, who was then an aide to Senator Henry Jackson. Later, in the Reagan years, Shulsky followed Perle to the Pentagon as Perle's arms-control adviser. In the '90s, Shulsky co-authored a book on intelligence called Silent Warfare, with Gary Schmitt. Shulsky had served with Schmitt on Moynihan's staff and they had remained friends. Asked about the Pentagon's Iraq intelligence "cell," Schmitt-who is currently the executive director of the Project for the New American Century-says that he can't say much about it "because one of my best friends is running it."
According to Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski, Luti and Shulsky ran NESA and the Office of Special Plans with brutal efficiency, purging people they disagreed with and enforcing the party line. "It was organized like a machine," she says. "The people working on the neocon agenda had a narrow, well-defined political agenda. They had a sense of mission." At NESA, Shulsky, she says, began "hot-desking," or taking an office wherever he could find one, working with Feith and Luti, before formally taking the reins of the newly created OSP. Together, she says, Luti and Shulsky turned cherry-picked pieces of uncorroborated, anti-Iraq intelligence into talking points, on issues like Iraq's WMD and its links to Al Qaeda. Shulsky constantly updated these papers, drawing on the intelligence unit, and circulated them to Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, and to Vice President Cheney. "Of course, we never thought they'd go directly to the White House," she adds.
Kwiatkowski recalls one meeting in which Luti, pressed to finish a report, told the staff, "I've got to get this over to 'Scooter' right away." She later found out that "Scooter" was none other than Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff. According to Kwiatkowski, Cheney had direct ties through Luti into NESA/OSP, a connection that was highly unorthodox.
"Never, ever, ever would a deputy undersecretary of Defense work directly on a project for the vice president," she says. "It was a little clue that we had an informal network into Vice President Cheney's office."
Although Feith insists that the OSP did not seek to gather its own intelligence, Kwiatkowski and others sharply disagree. Staff working for Luti and Shulsky in NESA/OSP churned out propaganda-style intelligence, she says. As an example, she cited the work of a U.S. intelligence officer and Arabic specialist, Navy Lt. Commander Youssef Aboul-Enein, who was a special assistant to Luti. "His job was to peruse the Arabic-language media to find articles that would incriminate Saddam Hussein about terrorism, and he translated these." Such raw intelligence is usually subject to a thorough vetting process, tracked, verified, and checked by intelligence professionals. But not at OSP-the material that it produced found its way directly into speeches by Bush, Cheney, and other officials.
According to Melvin Goodman, a former CIA official and an intelligence specialist at the National War College, the OSP officials routinely pushed lower-ranking staff around on intelligence matters. "People were being pulled aside [and being told], 'We saw your last piece and it's not what we're looking for,'" he says. "It was pretty blatant." Two State Department intelligence officials, Greg Thielmann and Christian Westermann, have both charged that pressure was being put on them to shape intelligence to fit policy, in particular from Bolton's office. "The Al Qaeda connection and nuclear weapons issue were the only two ways that you could link Iraq to an imminent security threat to the U.S.," Thielmann told the New York Times. "And the administration was grossly distorting the intelligence on both things."
BESIDES CHENEY, key members of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, including Perle and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, all Iraq hawks, had direct input into NESA/OSP. The offices of NESA were located on the Pentagon's fourth floor, seventh corridor of D Ring, and the Policy Board's offices were directly below, on the third floor. During the run-up to the Iraq war, Gingrich often came up for closed-door meetings with Luti, who in 1996 had served as a congressional fellow in Speaker of the House Gingrich's office.
As OSP got rolling, Luti brought in Colonel Bruner, a former military aide to Gingrich, and, together, Luti and Bruner opened the door to a vast flow of bogus intelligence fed to the Pentagon by Iraqi defectors associated with Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress group of exiles. Chalabi founded the Iraqi National Congress in 1992, with the help of a shadowy CIA-connected public-relations firm called the Rendon Group, one of whose former employees, Francis Brooke, has been a top aide to Chalabi ever since. A scion of an aristocratic Iraqi family, Chalabi fled Baghdad at the age of 13, in 1958, when the corrupt Iraqi Hashemite monarchy was overthrown by a coalition of communists and the Iraqi military. In the late 1960s, Chalabi studied mathematics at the University of Chicago with Wohlstetter, who introduced him to Richard Perle more than a decade later. Long associated with the heart of the neoconservative movement, Chalabi founded Petra Bank in Jordan, which grew to be Jordan's third-largest bank by the 1980s. But Chalabi was accused of bank fraud, embezzlement, and currency manipulation, and he barely escaped before Jordanian authorities could arrest him; in 1992, he was convicted and sentenced in absentia to more than 20 years of hard labor. After founding the INC, Chalabi's bungling, unreliability, and penchant for mismanaging funds caused the CIA to sour on him, but he never lost the support of Perle, Feith, Gingrich, and their allies; once, soon after 9/11, Perle invited Chalabi to address the Defense Policy Board.
According to multiple sources, Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress sent a steady stream of misleading and often faked intelligence reports into U.S. intelligence channels. That information would flow sometimes into NESA/OSP directly, sometimes through Defense Intelligence Agency debriefings of Iraqi defectors via the Defense Human Intelligence Service, and sometimes through the INC's own U.S.-funded Intelligence Collection Program, which was overseen by the Pentagon. The INC's intelligence "isn't reliable at all," according to Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism.
"Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, [creating] cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice presidential speeches."
Bruner, the aide to Luti and Gingrich's former staffer, "was Chalabi's handler," says Kwiatkowski. "He would arrange meetings with Chalabi and Chalabi's folks," she says, adding that the INC leader often brought people into the NESA/OSP offices for debriefings. Chalabi claims to have introduced only three actual defectors to the Pentagon, a figure Thielmann considers "awfully low." However, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times, the three defectors provided by Chalabi turned up exactly zero useful intelligence. The first, an Iraqi engineer, claimed to have specific information about biological weapons, but his information didn't pan out; the second claimed to know about mobile labs, but that information, too, was worthless; and the third, who claimed to have data about Iraq's nuclear program, proved to be a fraud. Chalabi also claimed to have given the Pentagon information about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda. "We gave the names of people who were doing the links," he told an interviewer from PBS'S Frontline. Those links, of course, have not been discovered. Thielmann told the same Frontline interviewer that the Office of Special Plans didn't apply strict intelligence-verification standards to "some of the information coming out of Chalabi and the INC that OSP and the Pentagon ran with."
In the war's aftermath, the Defense Intelligence Agency-which is not beholden to the neoconservative civilians at the Pentagon-leaked a report it prepared, concluding that few, if any, of the INC's informants provided worthwhile intelligence.
SO FAR, DESPITE ALL of the investigations underway, there is little sign that any of them are going to delve into the operations of the Luti-Shulsky Office of Special Plans and its secret intelligence unit. Because it operates in the Pentagon's policy shop, it is not officially part of the intelligence community, and so it is seemingly immune to congressional oversight.
With each passing day, it is becoming excruciatingly clearer just how wrong U.S. intelligence was in regard to Iraqi weapons and support for terrorism. The American teams of inspectors in the Iraq Survey Group, which has employed up to 1,400 people to scour the country and analyze the findings, have not been able to find a shred of evidence of anything other than dusty old plans and records of weapons apparently destroyed more than a decade ago. Countless examples of fruitless searches have been reported in the media. To cite one example: U.S. soldiers followed an intelligence report claiming that a complex built for Uday Hussein, Saddam's son, hid a weapons warehouse with poison-gas storage tanks. "Well," U.S. Army Major Ronald Hann Jr. told the Los Angeles Times, "the warehouse was a carport. It still had two cars inside. And the tanks had propane for the kitchen."
Countless other errors and exaggerations have become evident. The thousands of aluminum tubes supposedly imported by Iraq for uranium enrichment were fairly conclusively found to be designed to build noncontroversial rockets. The long-range unmanned aerial vehicles, allegedly built to deliver bioweapons, were small, rickety, experimental planes with wood frames. The mobile bioweapon labs turned out to have had other, civilian purposes. And the granddaddy of all falsehoods, the charge that Iraq sought uranium in the West African country of Niger, was based on forged documents-documents that the CIA, the State Department, and other agencies knew were fake nearly a year before President Bush highlighted the issue in his State of the Union address in January 2003.
"Either the system broke down," former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to visit Niger and whose findings helped show that the documents were forged, told Mother Jones, "or there was selective use of bits of information to justify a decision to go to war that had already been taken."
Edward Luttwak, a neoconservative scholar and author, says flatly that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence it had because it was afraid to go to the American people and say that the war was simply about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Instead, says Luttwak, the White House was groping for a rationale to satisfy the United Nations' criteria for war. "Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying about weapons of mass destruction," he says. "The ties to Al Qaeda? That's complete nonsense."
In the Senate, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) is pressing for the Intelligence Committee to extend its investigation to look into the specific role of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, but there is strong Republican resistance to the idea.
In the House, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation calling for a commission to investigate the intelligence mess and has collected more than a hundred Democrats-but no Republicans-in support of it. "I think they need to be looked at pretty carefully," Waxman told Mother Jones when asked about the Office of Special Plans. "I'd like to know whether the political people pushed the intelligence people to slant their conclusions."
Congressman Waxman, meet Lt. Colonel Kwiatkowski.
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More on Lieutenant Colonel Karen KwiatkowsKi:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2003/11/18/us-air-force-lt-colonel-speaks-out-against-bush-neocons.php
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2003/12/13/buchanan-discusses-jinsa-pnac-neocon-cabal-on-c-span.php
Neocon Potpouri:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2004/01/02/neo-con-potpourri.php | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2004 8:02 pm Post subject: Chutzpah, Thy Name Is Perle |
| Subj: Chutzpah, Thy Name Is Perle
Date: 2/5/2004 4:06:08 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net
To: hectorpv@comcast.net
Sent from the Internet (Details)
Friends,
Chutzpah, Thy Name Is Perle
If its one thing the neocons have it’s chutzpah, and arch-neocon Richard Perle has it to the max. In the following article, Jim Lobe describes the meaning of "chutzpah":
"Chutzpah—a Yiddish word that the dictionary defines as ‘unmitigated effrontery or impertinence, gall’—is best illustrated by a much-cited anecdote.
‘Chutzpah is when a man kills his mother and his father and then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he is an orphan.’"
And the neocons especially show their chutzpah in the current discussion of the missing WMD. Perle is now condemning the "intelligence failure" that allegedly caused the US government to believe that Saddam had threatening WMD. However, in the war build-up, Perle and his neocon brethren took the lead in promoting this view of Saddam’s WMD and castigating anyone who dared to question it. Lobe writes that "their single-minded message, repeated endlessly in op-ed columns, television interviews and Congressional testimony, was that the intelligence community was consistently underestimating the Iraqi threat in a deliberate effort to undermine the drive to war.
Their campaign now—and there is an orchestrated campaign underway, make no mistake—is to blame the CIA for exaggerating the Iraqi threat must rank right up there with parenticidal orphans."
The neocons, in fact, were in the forefront in promoting and fabricating the WMD lies. The neocons set up the all-important Office of Special Plans in the Defense Department "whose job it was to mine raw intelligence to find and disseminate the most threatening possible evidence of Iraq's WMD programs and alleged ties to Al Qaeda that the neoconservatives thought the CIA or even the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency had not given adequate credence." And Perle used his position as head of the Defense Policy Board "to ensure that ‘defectors’ handled by his good friend Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC)—such as Khidir Hamza, a former nuclear scientist who stoked totally unfounded fears that Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear-weapons program—were given the widest possible exposure to policy-makers. Senior intelligence officials have since identified the INC's defectors as the source of a great deal of the mis-, if not dis-information, that skewed its assessments."
In short, it was Perle and the neocons who promoted the most extreme claims regarding the bogus Iraqi WMD threat. Can they completely revise the past on this issue without taking any blame? In a marginally rational world this new effort would lead to nothing but ridicule. But then again, the fact that most of the neocons' lies have been ridiculous has not precluded their success so far.
______________________________________
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9890
Chutzpah, Thy Name Is Perle
Jim Lobe writes for Inter Press Service, an international newswire, and for Foreign Policy in Focus, a joint project of the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies and the New Mexico-based Interhemispheric Resource Center.
Published: Feb 03 2004
Chutzpah—a Yiddish word that the dictionary defines as "unmitigated effrontery or impertinence, gall"—is best illustrated by a much-cited anecdote.
"Chutzpah is when a man kills his mother and his father and then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he is an orphan."
In the last few days in Washington, however, prominent neoconservatives, particularly arch-hawk Richard Perle, are giving new meaning to the word.
It wasn't enough that Perle, author of a new book titled An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terrorism, gave the keynote speech last week at a rally at the Washington Convention Center in solidarity for an Iranian rebel group officially listed by the State Department as a "foreign terrorist organization." (A self-described terrorism expert, Perle later pleaded ignorance about the rally's purpose, despite the fact that the Red Cross and the La Leche League had figured out the connection and withdrawn their own association with the event.)
No, now Perle and his fellow neoconservatives are hailing chief U.S. weapons-of-mass-destruction hunter, David Kay. On resigning from his post last week, Kay charged that the intelligence community, and particularly the CIA, clearly exaggerated the size and scope of Saddam Hussein's alleged WMD programs. "I don't think they existed," he said, insisting that he himself, as well as the intelligence community, "were almost all wrong" about Iraq's alleged WMD stockpiles and reconstitution of Iraq's nuclear-arms program.
"I have always thought our intelligence in the Gulf has been woefully inadequate," Perle, former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (DPB), confided to The New York Times after Kay disclosed his findings.
You would think from that remark that Perle had spent the run-up to the Iraq invasion warning Congress and the public that the intelligence community had hyped the WMD threat posed by Saddam Hussein.
But, if you thought that, of course, you would be dead wrong. No, Perle and his close associates—such as Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney and former CIA director James Woolsey—said quite the opposite: their single-minded message, repeated endlessly in op-ed columns, television interviews and Congressional testimony, was that the intelligence community was consistently underestimating the Iraqi threat in a deliberate effort to undermine the drive to war.
Their campaign now—and there is an orchestrated campaign underway, make no mistake—is to blame the CIA for exaggerating the Iraqi threat must rank right up there with parenticidal orphans.
It was Gaffney, a long-time Perle protégè who worked under him in Sen. "Scoop" Jackson's office and later at the Pentagon during the Reagan administration, for example, who was raising alarms over Hussein's non-existent "atomic and perhaps even thermonuclear weapons" even before 9/11.
Hawking The War
"He (Hussein) has weapons of mass destruction," Perle stated unequivocally as early as November 2001—even as his friends in the Pentagon were setting up their Office of Special Plans (OSP), an informal intelligence unit whose job it was to mine raw intelligence to find and disseminate the most threatening possible evidence of Iraq's WMD programs and alleged ties to Al Qaeda that the neoconservatives thought the CIA or even the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency had not given adequate credence.
Perle even used his good offices as DPB chairman to ensure that "defectors" handled by his good friend Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress (INC)—such as Khidir Hamza, a former nuclear scientist who stoked totally unfounded fears that Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear-weapons program—were given the widest possible exposure to policy-makers. Senior intelligence officials have since identified the INC's defectors as the source of a great deal of the mis-, if not dis-information, that skewed its assessments.
For Perle, Hussein's WMD program was simply a given. "If (Hussein) eludes us and continues to refine, perfect and expand his arsenal of chemical and biological weapons," he testified to Congress in the fall of 2002, "the danger to us, already great, will only grow." The problem, of course, was that the arsenal whose existence was never subject to the slightest doubt by Perle and his friends didn't exist.
Indeed, just two weeks before his friend Kay acknowledged there were simply no weapons to be found, Perle insisted to an audience at his home base, the American Enterprise Institute, "I don't think that you can draw any conclusion from the fact that stockpiles were not found."
While Perle clearly assumed the existence of a massive WMD threat as described by his INC sources, he was even more expansive in the run-up to the war about Hussein's alleged operational ties to Al Qaeda, a notion for which only the political appointees at OSP could ever find even the slightest, but almost always uncorroborated, evidence.
Perle, for example, has always insisted that 9/11's operational mastermind, Mohammed Atta, met with an Iraqi intelligence official, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, at a Prague cafe five months before the suicide hijackings, despite the fact that the CIA and the FBI have both concluded that Atta was in Florida at the time of the alleged meeting. When al-Ani was captured by U.S. forces last July, Perle declared that his version of events would soon be confirmed, but then, in a suggestion that the CIA could not be trusted, added, "a lot depends on who is doing the interrogating." By all accounts, al-Ani has steadfastly denied ever meeting Atta, a problem Perle has not addressed lately.
An Axe To Grind Against The CIA
Perle and his fellow-neocons' contempt for the CIA dates to the 1970s when he and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld accused the agency of being naive about Soviet strategic capabilities and intentions. That set the pattern. To Perle, the CIA, like the State Department, has long been a haven for naive and foolish "liberals" incapable of understanding just how dangerous and threatening the enemy—any enemy—really is.
"Over time, it has become an agency with very strong, mostly liberal policy views, and these views have again and again distorted its analysis and presentation of its own information," Perle wrote in An End to Evil, which was co-authored by former White House speechwriter, David Frum.
"The CIA is blinded, too, by the squeamishness that many liberal-minded people feel about noticing the dark side of third world cultures," he continued, arguing that this is especially true of the Arab world. "The CIA's reports on the Middle East today are colored by similar ideological biases—exacerbated by poor understanding of the region's culture and a politically correct disinclination to acknowledge unflattering facts about non-Western peoples."
"(D)ata yields useful information only if it is analyzed without ideological prejudices or institutional biases," according to Perle's book. "A good intelligence analyst must constantly question his own ideas about the phenomena he studies."
Good advice. Now, if only Perle and his fellow-neocons had applied it to themselves, their own assessments might not have been so much worse than the CIA's.
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Cheney is associated with the JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs: www.jinsa.org ) /PNAC ( Project for the New American Century www.newamericancentury.org ) Neoconservative cabal that had wanted regime change in Iraq for years (for Israel and oil). Listen to Dreyfuss on 'Democracy Now' this morning via the following URL as he also mentioned that the Iraq invasion was for Israel and oil:
Dreyfuss Discusses Cheney and his (Neocon) Lie Factory Piece
on 'Democracy Now' national radio program in the USA today:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/06/1527224 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2004 8:10 pm Post subject: Bush seeks backing for 'greater Mideast' plan |
| Subj: Bush seeks backing for 'greater Mideast' plan
Date: 2/6/04 6:53:52 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: TOOL
He's out of his freaking mind!!!
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1073281565973
Bush seeks backing for 'greater Mideast' plan
By Roula Khalaf in London and Guy Dinmore in Washington
Published: February 5 2004 4:00 | Last Updated: February 5 2004 4:00
The Bush administration is trying to enlist European support for a grand plan to reform the Arab and Islamic world and integrate it within a western security umbrella.
American and European Union officials held a meeting in Washington last week on the so-called "greater Middle East" initiative, an evolving project that could involve countries from Morocco to as far east as Pakistan and is being billed as a priority for US foreign policy this year.
Details of the proposals have yet to be worked out and it remained unclear whether the US was willing to dedicate new funds to the project.
But EU diplomats said the meeting had provided some clarity to an ambitious post-Iraq war idea that had been under debate in the US administration.
A package of political, security and economic proposals is expected to be unveiled this summer at a series of Nato, Group of Eight and EU-US summits in June.
The EU, however, wants to ensure that the project is more than a convenient slogan in a US presidential election year and that it would enhance rather than undermine its existing project: the EU-Mediterranean initiative launched in Barcelona in 1995 to promote economic reforms and create a free-trade area by 2010.
As important, according to EU diplomats, is that any new initiative should maintain the search for a Palestinian-Israeli peace settlement.
The EU's Barcelona process, which includes Israel, has stumbled when the peace process has been in disarray, with Arab officials often refusing to attend meetings that included Israelis.
Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, called on Europe at the World Economic Forum in Davos last month to join the US in a "forward strategy for freedom" that "commits us to support those who work and sacrifice for reform across the greater Middle East".
Diplomats said the US was considering ways of increasing the level of relations Nato has with Arab countries, though it was unlikely that they would reach the stage of a Partnership for Peace Programme - the post-cold war co-operation pact with east European countries.
The US and EU are also considering issuing a joint statement on the "greater Middle East" at their summit in Ireland.
The initiative reflects the administration's post-September 11 recognition that authoritarianism is a main cause of terrorism. But it also appears to correspond to the neo-conservative view that reforming the Arab world should be the priority and would somehow facilitate a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
A high-profile new transatlantic initiative ahead of the US presidential elections could overshadow the collapse of the US- sponsored Middle East "road map" and US troubles in the reconstruction of Iraq.
Some Arab governments have been approached about the idea informally but, according to one US-based diplomat, the initial reaction from Egypt and Jordan was less than enthusiastic.
Did you witness GW Bush performing any National Guard Service between May 1972 and October 1973, in either Alabama or Texas? If so, you could be eligible for thousands of dollars in unclaimed reward money!! Here are the details of the Texas and Alabama rewards. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2004 9:19 pm Post subject: Re: Dreyfuss Discusses Cheney and his (Neocon) Lie Factory P |
|
Robert Dreyfuss mentioned in the above reference 'Democracy Now' radio program this morning that the Iraq invasion was for oil and Israel (Dreyfuss wrote the following article for 'Mother Jones' as well):
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/03/ma_273_01.html
The Thirty-Year Itch
Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington's hawks conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf's oil. Now, with the same strategists firmly in control of the White House, the Bush administration is playing out their script for global dominance.
By Robert Dreyfuss
March/April 2003 Issue
If you were to spin the globe and look for real estate critical to building an American empire, your first stop would have to be the Persian Gulf. The desert sands of this region hold two of every three barrels of oil in the world -- Iraq's reserves alone are equal, by some estimates, to those of Russia, the United States, China, and Mexico combined. For the past 30 years, the Gulf has been in the crosshairs of an influential group of Washington foreign-policy strategists, who believe that in order to ensure its global dominance, the United States must seize control of the region and its oil. Born during the energy crisis of the 1970s and refined since then by a generation of policymakers, this approach is finding its boldest expression yet in the Bush administration -- which, with its plan to invade Iraq and install a regime beholden to Washington, has moved closer than any of its predecessors to transforming the Gulf into an American protectorate. In the geopolitical vision driving current U.S. policy toward Iraq, the key to national security is global hegemony -- dominance over any and all potential rivals. To that end, the United States must not only be able to project its military forces anywhere, at any time. It must also control key resources, chief among them oil -- and especially Gulf oil. To the hawks who now set the tone at the White House and the Pentagon, the region is crucial not simply for its share of the U.S. oil supply (other sources have become more important over the years), but because it would allow the United States to maintain a lock on the world's energy lifeline and potentially deny access to its global competitors. The administration "believes you have to control resources in order to have access to them," says Chas Freeman, who served as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "They are taken with the idea that the end of the Cold War left the United States able to impose its will globally -- and that those who have the ability to shape events with power have the duty to do so. It's ideology." Iraq, in this view, is a strategic prize of unparalleled importance. Unlike the oil beneath Alaska's frozen tundra, locked away in the steppes of central Asia, or buried under stormy seas, Iraq's crude is readily accessible and, at less than $1.50 a barrel, some of the cheapest in the world to produce. Already, over the past several months, Western companies have been meeting with Iraqi exiles to try to stake a claim to that bonanza. But while the companies hope to cash in on an American-controlled Iraq, the push to remove Saddam Hussein hasn't been driven by oil executives, many of whom are worried about the consequences of war. Nor are Vice President Cheney and President Bush, both former oilmen, looking at the Gulf simply for the profits that can be earned there. The administration is thinking bigger, much bigger, than that. "Controlling Iraq is about oil as power, rather than oil as fuel," says Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and author of Resource Wars. "Control over the Persian Gulf translates into control over Europe, Japan, and China. It's having our hand on the spigot." Ever since the oil shocks of the 1970s, the United States has steadily been accumulating military muscle in the Gulf by building bases, selling weaponry, and forging military partnerships. Now, it is poised to consolidate its might in a place that will be a fulcrum of the world's balance of power for decades to come. At a stroke, by taking control of Iraq, the Bush administration can solidify a long-running strategic design. "It's the Kissinger plan," says James Akins, a former U.S. diplomat. "I thought it had been killed, but it's back." Akins learned a hard lesson about the politics of oil when he served as a U.S. envoy in Kuwait and Iraq, and ultimately as ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the oil crisis of 1973 and '74. At his home in Washington, D.C., shelves filled with Middle Eastern pottery and other memorabilia cover the walls, souvenirs of his years in the Foreign Service. Nearly three decades later, he still gets worked up while recalling his first encounter with the idea that the United States should be prepared to occupy Arab oil-producing countries. In 1975, while Akins was ambassador in Saudi Arabia, an article headlined "Seizing Arab Oil" appeared in Harper's. The author, who used the pseudonym Miles Ignotus, was identified as "a Washington-based professor and defense consultant with intimate links to high-level U.S. policymakers." The article outlined, as Akins puts it, "how we could solve all our economic and political problems by taking over the Arab oil fields [and] bringing in Texans and Oklahomans to operate them." Simultaneously, a rash of similar stories appeared in other magazines and newspapers. "I knew that it had to have been the result of a deep background briefing," Akins says. "You don't have eight people coming up with the same screwy idea at the same time, independently. "Then I made a fatal mistake," Akins continues. "I said on television that anyone who would propose that is either a madman, a criminal, or an agent of the Soviet Union." Soon afterward, he says, he learned that the background briefing had been conducted by his boss, then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Akins was fired later that year. Kissinger has never acknowledged having planted the seeds for the article. But in an interview with Business Week that same year, he delivered a thinly veiled threat to the Saudis, musing about bringing oil prices down through "massive political warfare against countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran to make them risk their political stability and maybe their security if they did not cooperate." In the 1970s, America's military presence in the Gulf was virtually nil, so the idea of seizing control of its oil was a pipe dream. Still, starting with the Miles Ignotus article, and a parallel one by conservative strategist and Johns Hopkins University professor Robert W. Tucker in Commentary, the idea began to gain favor among a feisty group of hardline, pro-Israeli thinkers, especially the hawkish circle aligned with Democratic senators Henry Jackson of Washington and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. Eventually, this amalgam of strategists came to be known as "neoconservatives," and they played important roles in President Reagan's Defense Department and at think tanks and academic policy centers in the 1980s. Led by Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's influential Defense Policy Board, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, they now occupy several dozen key posts in the White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department. At the top, they are closest to Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who have been closely aligned since both men served in the White House under President Ford in the mid-1970s. They also clustered around Cheney when he served as secretary of defense during the Gulf War in 1991. Throughout those years, and especially after the Gulf War, U.S. forces have steadily encroached on the Gulf and the surrounding region, from the Horn of Africa to Central Asia. In preparing for an invasion and occupation of Iraq, the administration has been building on the steps taken by military and policy planners over the past quarter century. Step one: The Rapid Deployment Force
In 1973 and '74, and again in 1979, political upheavals in the Middle East led to huge spikes in oil prices, which rose fifteenfold over the decade and focused new attention on the Persian Gulf. In January 1980, President Carter effectively declared the Gulf a zone of U.S. influence, especially against encroachment from the Soviet Union. "Let our position be absolutely clear," he said, announcing what came to be known as the Carter Doctrine. "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." To back up this doctrine, Carter created the Rapid Deployment Force, an "over-the-horizon" military unit capable of rushing several thousand U.S. troops to the Gulf in a crisis. Step two: The Central Command
In the 1980s, under President Reagan, the United States began pressing countries in the Gulf for access to bases and support facilities. The Rapid Deployment Force was transformed into the Central Command, a new U.S. military command authority with responsibility for the Gulf and the surrounding region from eastern Africa to Afghanistan. Reagan tried to organize a "strategic consensus" of anti-Soviet allies, including Turkey, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. The United States sold billions of dollars' worth of arms to the Saudis in the early '80s, from AWACS surveillance aircraft to F-15 fighters. And in 1987, at the height of the war between Iraq and Iran, the U.S. Navy created the Joint Task Force-Middle East to protect oil tankers plying the waters of the Gulf, thus expanding a U.S. naval presence of just three or four warships into a flotilla of 40-plus aircraft carriers, battleships, and cruisers. Step three: The Gulf War
Until 1991, the United States was unable to persuade the Arab Gulf states to allow a permanent American presence on their soil. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, while maintaining its close relationship with the United States, began to diversify its commercial and military ties; by the time U.S. Ambassador Chas Freeman arrived there in the late Ô80s, the United States had fallen to fourth place among arms suppliers to the kingdom. "The United States was being supplanted even in commercial terms by the British, the French, even the Chinese," Freeman notes. All that changed with the Gulf War. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states no longer opposed a direct U.S. military presence, and American troops, construction squads, arms salesmen, and military assistance teams rushed in. "The Gulf War put Saudi Arabia back on the map and revived a relationship that had been severely attrited," says Freeman. In the decade after the war, the United States sold more than $43 billion worth of weapons, equipment, and military construction projects to Saudi Arabia, and $16 billion more to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, according to data compiled by the Federation of American Scientists. Before Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military enjoyed the right to stockpile, or "pre-position," military supplies only in the comparatively remote Gulf state of Oman on the Indian Ocean. After the war, nearly every country in the region began conducting joint military exercises, hosting U.S. naval units and Air Force squadrons, and granting the United States pre-positioning rights. "Our military presence in the Middle East has increased dramatically," then-Defense Secretary William Cohen boasted in 1995. Another boost to the U.S. presence was the unilateral imposition, in 1991, of no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, enforced mostly by U.S. aircraft from bases in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. "There was a massive buildup, especially around Incirlik in Turkey, to police the northern no-fly zone, and around [the Saudi capital of] Riyadh, to police the southern no-fly zone," says Colin Robinson of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington think tank. A billion-dollar, high-tech command center was built by Saudi Arabia near Riyadh, and over the past two years the United States has secretly been completing another one in Qatar. The Saudi facilities "were built with capacities far beyond the ability of Saudi Arabia to use them," Robinson says. "And that's exactly what Qatar is doing now." Step four: Afghanistan
The war in Afghanistan -- and the open-ended war on terrorism, which has led to U.S strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and elsewhere -- further boosted America's strength in the region. The administration has won large increases in the defense budget -- which now stands at about $400 billion, up from just over $300 billion in 2000 -- and a huge chunk of that budget, perhaps as much as $60 billion, is slated to support U.S. forces in and around the Persian Gulf. Military facilities on the perimeter of the Gulf, from Djibouti in the Horn of Africa to the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, have been expanded, and a web of bases and training missions has extended the U.S. presence deep into central Asia. From Afghanistan to the landlocked former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, U.S. forces have established themselves in an area that had long been in Russia's sphere of influence. Oil-rich in its own right, and strategically vital, central Asia is now the eastern link in a nearly continuous chain of U.S. bases, facilities, and allies stretching from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea far into the Asian hinterland. Step five: Iraq
Removing Saddam Hussein could be the final piece of the puzzle, cementing an American imperial presence. It is "highly possible" that the United States will maintain military bases in Iraq, Robert Kagan, a leading neoconservative strategist, recently told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We will probably need a major concentration of forces in the Middle East over a long period of time," he said. "When we have economic problems, it's been caused by disruptions in our oil supply. If we have a force in Iraq, there will be no disruption in oil supplies." Kagan, along with William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, is a founder of the think tank Project for the New American Century, an assembly of foreign-policy hawks whose supporters include the Pentagon's Perle, New Republic publisher Martin Peretz, and former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey. Among the group's affiliates in the Bush administration are Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz; I. Lewis Libby, the vice president's chief of staff; Elliott Abrams, the Middle East director at the National Security Council; and Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition groups. Kagan's group, tied to a web of similar neoconservative, pro-Israeli organizations, represents the constellation of thinkers whose ideological affinity was forged in the Nixon and Ford administrations. To Akins, who has just returned from Saudi Arabia, it's a team that looks all too familiar, seeking to implement the plan first outlined back in 1975. "It'll be easier once we have Iraq," he says. "Kuwait, we already have. Qatar and Bahrain, too. So it's only Saudi Arabia we're talking about, and the United Arab Emirates falls into place."
LAST SUMMER, Perle provided a brief glimpse into his circle's thinking when he invited rand Corporation strategist Laurent Murawiec to make a presentation to his Defense Policy Board, a committee of former senior officials and generals that advises the Pentagon on big-picture policy ideas. Murawiec's closed-door briefing provoked a storm of criticism when it was leaked to the media; he described Saudi Arabia as the "kernel of evil," suggested that the Saudi royal family should be replaced or overthrown, and raised the idea of a U.S. occupation of Saudi oil fields. He ultimately lost his job when rand decided he was too controversial. Murawiec is part of a Washington school of thought that views virtually all of the nations in the Gulf as unstable "failed states" and maintains that only the United States has the power to forcibly reorganize and rebuild them. In this view, the arms systems and bases that were put in place to defend the region also provide a ready-made infrastructure for taking over countries and their oil fields in the event of a crisis. The Defense Department likely has contingency plans to occupy Saudi Arabia, says Robert E. Ebel, director of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank whose advisers include Kissinger; former Defense Secretary and CIA director James Schlesinger; and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter's national security adviser. "If something happens in Saudi Arabia," Ebel says, "if the ruling family is ousted, if they decide to shut off the oil supply, we have to go in." Two years ago, Ebel, a former mid-level CIA official, oversaw a CSIS task force that included several members of Congress as well as representatives from industry including ExxonMobil, Arco, BP, Shell, Texaco, and the American Petroleum Institute. Its report, "The Geopolitics of Energy Into the 21st Century," concluded that the world will find itself dependent for many years on unstable oil-producing nations, around which conflicts and wars are bound to swirl. "Oil is high-profile stuff," Ebel says. "Oil fuels military power, national treasuries, and international politics. It is no longer a commodity to be bought and sold within the confines of traditional energy supply and demand balances. Rather, it has been transformed into a determinant of well-being, of national security, and of international power." As vital as the Persian Gulf is now, its strategic importance is likely to grow exponentially in the next 20 years. Nearly one out of every three barrels of oil reserves in the world lie under just two countries: Saudi Arabia (with 259 billion barrels of proven reserves) and Iraq (112 billion). Those figures may understate Iraq's largely unexplored reserves, which according to U.S. government estimates may hold as many as 432 billion barrels. With supplies in many other regions, especially the United States and the North Sea, nearly exhausted, oil from Saudi Arabia and Iraq is becoming ever more critical -- a fact duly noted in the administration's National Energy Policy, released in 2001 by a White House task force. By 2020, the Gulf will supply between 54 percent and 67 percent of the world's crude, the document said, making the region "vital to U.S. interests." According to G. Daniel Butler, an oil-markets analyst at the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), Saudi Arabia's production capacity will rise from its current 9.4 million barrels a day to 22.1 million over the next 17 years. Iraq, which in 2002 produced a mere 2 million barrels a day, "could easily be a double-digit producer by 2020," says Butler. U.S. strategists aren't worried primarily about America's own oil supplies; for decades, the United States has worked to diversify its sources of oil, with Venezuela, Nigeria, Mexico, and other countries growing in importance. But for Western Europe and Japan, as well as the developing industrial powers of eastern Asia, the Gulf is all-important. Whoever controls it will maintain crucial global leverage for decades to come. Today, notes the EIA's Butler, two-thirds of Gulf oil goes to Western industrial nations. By 2015, according to a study by the CIA's National Intelligence Council, three-quarters of the Gulf's oil will go to Asia, chiefly to China. China's growing dependence on the Gulf could cause it to develop closer military and political ties with countries such as Iran and Iraq, according to the report produced by Ebel's CSIS task force. "They have different political interests in the Gulf than we do," Ebel says. "Is it to our advantage to have another competitor for oil in the Persian Gulf?" David Long, who served as a U.S. diplomat in Saudi Arabia and as chief of the Near East division in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research during the Reagan administration, likens the Bush administration's approach to the philosophy of Admiral Mahan, the 19th-century military strategist who advocated the use of naval power to create a global American empire. "They want to be the world's enforcer," he says. "It's a worldview, a geopolitical position. They say, 'We need hegemony in the region.'" UNTIL THE 1970s, the face of American power in the Gulf was the U.S. oil industry, led by Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Texaco, and Gulf, all of whom competed fiercely with Britain's BP and Anglo-Dutch Shell. But in the early '70s, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states nationalized their oil industries, setting up state-run companies to run wells, pipelines, and production facilities. Not only did that enhance the power of opec, enabling that organization to force a series of sharp price increases, but it alarmed U.S. policymakers. Today, a growing number of Washington strategists are advocating a direct U.S. challenge to state-owned petroleum industries in oil-producing countries, especially the Persian Gulf. Think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and CSIS are conducting discussions about privatizing Iraq's oil industry. Some of them have put forward detailed plans outlining how Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and other nations could be forced to open up their oil and gas industries to foreign investment. The Bush administration itself has been careful not to say much about what might happen to Iraq's oil. But State Department officials have had preliminary talks about the oil industry with Iraqi exiles, and there have been reports that the U.S. military wants to use at least part of the country's oil revenue to pay for the cost of military occupation. "One of the major problems with the Persian Gulf is that the means of production are in the hands of the state," Rob Sobhani, an oil-industry consultant, told an American Enterprise Institute conference last fall in Washington. Already, he noted, several U.S. oil companies are studying the possibility of privatization in the Gulf. Dismantling government-owned oil companies, Sobhani argued, could also force political changes in the region. "The beginning of liberal democracy can be achieved if you take the means of production out of the hands of the state," he said, acknowledging that Arabs would resist that idea. "It's going to take a lot of selling, a lot of marketing," he concluded. Just which companies would get to claim Iraq's oil has been a subject of much debate. After a war, the contracts that Iraq's state-owned oil company has signed with European, Russian, and Chinese oil firms might well be abrogated, leaving the field to U.S. oil companies. "What they have in mind is denationalization, and then parceling Iraqi oil out to American oil companies," says Akins. "The American oil companies are going to be the main beneficiaries of this war." The would-be rulers of a post-Saddam Iraq have been thinking along the same lines. "American oil companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil," says Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a group of aristocrats and wealthy Iraqis who fled the country when its repressive monarchy was overthrown in 1958. During a visit to Washington last fall, Chalabi held meetings with at least three major U.S. oil companies, trying to enlist their support. Similar meetings between Iraqi exiles and U.S. companies have also been taking place in Europe. "Iraqi exiles have approached us, saying, 'You can have our oil if we can get back in there,'" says R. Gerald Bailey, who headed Exxon's Middle East operations until 1997. "All the major American companies have met with them in Paris, London, Brussels, all over. They're all jockeying for position. You can't ignore it, but you've got to do it on the QT. And you can't wait till it gets too far along." But the companies are also anxious about the consequences of war, according to many experts, oil-company executives, and former State Department officials. "The oil companies are caught in the middle," says Bailey. Executives fear that war could create havoc in the region, turning Arab states against the United States and Western oil companies. On the other hand, should a U.S. invasion of Iraq be successful, they want to be there when the oil is divvied up. Says David Long, the former U.S. diplomat, "It's greed versus fear." Ibrahim Oweiss, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown University who coined the term "petrodollar" and has also been a consultant to Occidental and BP, has been closely watching the cautious maneuvering by the companies. "I know that the oil companies are scared about the outcome of this," he says. "They are not at all sure this is in the best interests of the oil industry." Anne Joyce, an editor at the Washington-based Middle East Policy Council who has spoken privately to top Exxon officials, says it's clear that most oil-industry executives "are afraid" of what a war in the Persian Gulf could mean in the long term -- especially if tensions in the region spiral out of control. "They see it as much too risky, and they are risk averse," she says. "They think it has 'fiasco' written all over it." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Feb 08, 2004 3:45 am Post subject: The Day Cheney was Rocked to the Core/Scott Ritter |
| The Day Cheney was Rocked to the Core
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times Saturday 07 February 2004 WASHINGTON - If United States Vice President Dick Cheney was hoping that the cold, crisp air of Davos and his private audience with Pope John Paul II late last month would revive his spirits, as well as his standing in the polls, he must be deeply disappointed. Since returning home, he has faced a seemingly unrelenting succession of disclosures and attacks that appear to get worse with each passing day. What the albatross was to the ancient mariner, Cheney is fast becoming to George W Bush's re-election chances. Just consider what happened to Cheney Thursday: the early morning edition of the Wall Street Journal ran an article - first reported by Newsweek - on how Justice Department investigators had asked Halliburton Company for documents relating to US$180 million in allegedly illegal payments by a consortium of companies, including Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, in connection with the construction of a big natural-gas plant in Nigeria in the late 1990s, while Cheney was Halliburton's chief executive officer. When the Los Angeles Times hit the news stands a couple of hours later, Cheney was right there on the front page with the headline: "Scalia was Cheney Hunt Trip Guest; Ethics Concern Grows." Antonin Scalia is a Supreme Court Justice who was Cheney's guest on a recent and rather costly (to the taxpayer) bird-hunting trip to Louisiana, and who also will soon hear a major case on government secrecy in which the vice president is the defendant. Legal ethics experts quoted in the story, of course, zeroed in on the question of whether Scalia might best recuse himself from hearing the case, but there were also suggestions that perhaps Cheney could have exercised slightly better judgement. "It is not just a trip with a litigant. It's a trip at the expense of the litigant," noted one law professor. Finished with the morning papers, Cheney may have tuned in to watch Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director George Tenet deliver a passionate defense at Georgetown University of the official intelligence community's performance in the runup to the Iraq war, only to find himself a target, if only inferentially. While Tenet didn't say anything explicitly about Cheney, he certainly didn't do much to dispel the increasingly strong impression in Washington - among Democrats, it's become a conviction - that, of all of Bush's senior advisers, Cheney and his staff worked hardest to hype what the intelligence community was saying about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction programs. While the intelligence community had concluded that Saddam wanted nuclear weapons, Tenet declared, it also made clear as of late 2002 that Saddam had none, and that he probably would not have been able to make one until some time between 2007 and 2009, at the earliest. That assertion, of course, raises a major question. If the intelligence community agreed that Saddam had no nuclear weapons, where did Cheney get the information that would substantiate his statement on the very day that the US launched its invasion last March: "And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." The answer, according to Democratic members of the Congressional intelligence committees, who have become increasingly outspoken in recent days, is that Cheney and his staff had an independent source of "intelligence" outside the formal intelligence community. Lodged in the Pentagon's policy shop under Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the now-notorious Office of Special Plans "cherry-picked" raw intelligence, interviewed "defectors", and produced its own talking points and analysis that were "stovepiped" straight to Cheney's office, notably John Hannah, his top Mideast staffer, and I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, his powerful chief of staff. When asked about this theory by a Georgetown student on Thursday, Tenet answered artfully, asserting: "I can tell you with certainty that the president of the United States gets his intelligence from one person and one community - me ... The rest of it, I don't know." In the legal profession, Tenet's reply is called a negative pregnant, an apparent denial that suggests that further questioning may be fruitful. Indeed, Republican Jane Harmon, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, noted in a CNN interview on Thursday evening that, in speaking of "one community", Tenet was effectively confirming that the Pentagon-Cheney channel, that provided a much more alarmist view of Saddam's capabilities, may well have been at work But if Cheney felt displeased by Tenet's performance, things only got worse - much worse - later in the afternoon when United Press International (UPI) reported what has been rumored ever since Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation into the "outing" as a CIA officer by "two senior administration officials" of Valerie Plame, shortly after her husband, retired ambassador Joseph Wilson, had published an article in the New York Times charging that the administration knew that its reports of Saddam's alleged attempts to buy uranium yellowcake in Africa were bogus. Quoting "federal law-enforcement officials," UPI's intelligence correspondent Richard Sale reported on Thursday that the two main suspects were none other than Libby and Hannah. One official reportedly told Sale that Hannah was being advised "that he faces a real possibility of doing jail time" in order to pressure him to implicate higher-ups - presumably Libby, if not, perhaps, Cheney himself. A 1982 law makes deliberately revealing the identity of covert intelligence officers a felony punishable by as many as 10 years in prison. If either Hannah or Libby were officially named as suspects or actually indicted, the impact on Cheney's credibility and electability would be devastating. According to recent polls, Cheney's approval ratings, hovering around 20 percent, are already far below Bush's, which have themselves sunk below 50 percent for the first time in his presidency. Even Halliburton, whose public image has become so tarnished that it has launched a controversial television ad campaign to boost its image, last week listed Cheney's association to the company as a "risk factor" for its shareholders. Republicans in Congress, particularly on the intelligence and foreign relations committees, find themselves having to devote more time and political capital to defending the vice president, and even some influential Republican donors have privately suggested that Cheney bow out. Speculation about possible replacements - most recently, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani (the Republican convention is in New York City, August 30 to September 2.) - is growing steadily. Of course, there's always another day.
Published on Friday, February 6, 2004
http://www.iht.com/articles/128281.html
Not Everyone Got it Wrong on Iraq's Weapons
by Scott Ritter
'We were all wrong," David Kay, the Bush administration's former top
weapons sleuth in Iraq, recently told members of Congress after acknowledging
that there were probably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Kay insisted that the blame for the failure to find any such weapons lay
with the U.S. intelligence community, which, according to Kay, provided
inaccurate assessments.
The Kay remarks appear to be an attempt to spin potentially damaging
data to the political advantage of President George W. Bush.
The president's decision to create an "independent commission" to
investigate this intelligence failure only reinforces this suspicion,
since such a commission would only be given the mandate to examine
intelligence data, and not the policies and decision-making processes
that made use of that data. More disturbing, the commission's findings
would be delayed until late fall, after the November presidential
election.
The fact, independent of the findings of any commission, is that not
everyone was wrong.
I, for one, was not. I did my level best to demand facts from the Bush
administration to back up their allegations regarding Iraq's WMD and,
failing that, spoke out and wrote in as many forums as possible in an
effort to educate the publics of the United States and the world about
the danger of going to war based on a hyped-up threat.
In this I was not alone. Rolf Ekeus, the former head of the UN weapons
inspectors in Iraq, has declared that under his direction, Iraq was
"fundamentally disarmed" as early as 1996. Hans Blix, who headed UN
weapons inspections in Iraq in the months before the invasion in March
2003, stated that his inspectors had found no evidence of either WMD or
WMD-related programs in Iraq. And officials familiar with Iraq, like
Ambassador Joseph Wilson and State Department intelligence analyst Greg
Theilmann, both exposed the unsustained nature of the Bush claims
regarding Iraq's nuclear capability.
The riddle surrounding Iraq's WMD was solvable without resorting to war.
For all the layers of deceit and obfuscation, there existed enough basic
elements of truth and substantive fact about the disposition of Saddam
Hussein's secret weapons programs to permit the Gordian knot to be
cleaved by anyone willing to try. Sadly, it seems that there was no
predisposition on the part of those assigned the task of solving the
riddle to do so.
Bush's decision to limit the scope of any inquiry to intelligence
matters, effectively blocking any critique of his administration's use -
or abuse - of such intelligence, is absurd, especially when one
considers that the Bush administration was already talking of war with
Iraq in 2002, prior to the preparation of a National Intelligence
Estimate (NIE) - the defining document on a particular area of the world
or specified threat - by the director of Central Intelligence.
According to a Department of Defense after-action report on Iraq titled
"Operation Iraqi Freedom: Strategic Lessons Learned," a copy of which
was obtained by The Washington Times in September 2003, "President Bush
approved the overall war strategy for Iraq in August last year." The
specific date cited was Aug. 29, 2002 - eight months before the first
bomb was dropped.
The CIA did eventually produce a National Intelligence Estimate for
Iraq, but only in October 2002, after Bush had already decided on war.
The title of the NIE, "Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass
Destruction," is reflective of a predisposition that was not supported
either by the facts available at the time, or by the passage of time.
Stu Cohen, a 28-year veteran of the CIA, wrote in a statement published
on the CIA Web site on Nov. 28, 2003, that the Oct. 2002 National
Intelligence Estimate "judged with high confidence that Iraq had
chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles in excess of the
150-kilometer limit imposed by the UN Security Council. . These
judgments were essentially the same conclusions reached by the United
Nations and a wide array of intelligence services - friendly and
unfriendly alike."
Cohen said the October NIE was "policy neutral" - meaning it did not
propose a policy that argued either for or against going to war. He also
stated that no one who worked on the NIE had been pressured by the Bush
White House.
Cohen is wrong in his assertions. The fact that a major policy decision
like war with Iraq was made without the benefit of an NIE is, in and of
itself, policy manipulation.
I worked with Cohen on numerous occasions during this time, and consider
him a reasonable man. So I had to wonder when this intelligence
professional, confronted with the totality of the failure of the CIA to
accurately assess the WMD threat, wrote that he was "convinced that no
reasonable person could have viewed the totality of the information that
the intelligence community had at its disposal - literally millions of
pages - and reached any conclusions or alternative views that were
profoundly different from those that we reached."
I consider myself also to be a reasonable person. Like Cohen and the
intelligence professionals who prepared the October 2002 NIE, I was
intimately familiar with vast quantities of intelligence data collected
from around the world by numerous foreign intelligence services
(including the CIA) and on the ground in Iraq by UN weapons inspectors,
at least until the time of my resignation from Unscom in August 1998.
Based on this experience, I was asked by Arms Control Today, the journal
of the Arms Control Association, to write an article on the status of
disarmament regarding Iraq's WMD.
The article, "The Case for Iraq's Qualitative Disarmament," was
published in June 2000 and received broad coverage. Its conclusions were
dismissed by the intelligence communities of the United States and
Britain. But my finding - that "because of the work carried out by
Unscom, it can be fairly stated that Iraq was qualitatively disarmed at
the time inspectors were withdrawn [in December 1998]" - was an accurate
assessment of the disarming of Iraq's WMD capabilities, much more so
than the CIA's October NIE or any corresponding analysis carried out by
British intelligence services.
I am not alone in my analysis. Ray McGovern, who heads a group called
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, or VIPS, also takes
umbrage at Cohen's "no reasonable person" assertion. "Had he taken the
trouble to read the op-eds and other issuances of VIPs members over the
past two years," McGovern told me, he would have found that "our
writings consistently contained conclusions and alternative views that
were indeed profoundly different - even without having had access to
what Stu calls the 'totality of the information.' And Stu never
indicated he thought us not 'reasonable' - at least back when many of us
worked with him at CIA."
The fact is that McGovern and I, together with scores of intelligence
professionals, retired or still in service, who studied Iraq and its WMD
capabilities, are reasonable men. We got it right.
The Bush administration, in its rush to war, ignored our advice and the
body of factual data we used, and instead relied on rumor, speculation,
exaggeration and falsification to mislead the American people and their
elected representatives into supporting a war that is rapidly turning
into a quagmire. We knew the truth about Iraq's WMD. Sadly, no one
listened.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=332835&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
U.S. checking possibility of pumping oil from northern Iraq to Haifa, via Jordan
By Amiram Cohen
The United States has asked Israel to check the possibility of pumping oil from Iraq to the oil refineries in Haifa. The request came in a telegram last week from a senior Pentagon official to a top Foreign Ministry official in Jerusalem.
The Prime Minister's Office, which views the pipeline to Haifa as a "bonus" the U.S. could give to Israel in return for its unequivocal support for the American-led campaign in Iraq, had asked the Americans for the official telegram.
The new pipeline would take oil from the Kirkuk area, where some 40 percent of Iraqi oil is produced, and transport it via Mosul, and then across Jordan to Israel. The U.S. telegram included a request for a cost estimate for repairing the Mosul-Haifa pipeline that was in use prior to 1948. During the War of Independence, the Iraqis stopped the flow of oil to Haifa and the pipeline fell into disrepair over the years.
The National Infrastructure Ministry has recently conducted research indicating that construction of a 42-inch diameter pipeline between Kirkuk and Haifa would cost about $400,000 per kilometer. The old Mosul-Haifa pipeline was only 8 inches in diameter.
National Infrastructure Minister Yosef Paritzky said yesterday that the port of Haifa is an attractive destination for Iraqi oil and that he plans to discuss this matter with the U.S. secretary of energy during his planned visit to Washington next month. Paritzky added that the plan depends on Jordan's consent and that Jordan would receive a transit fee for allowing the oil to piped through its territory. The minister noted, however, that "due to pan-Arab concerns, it will be hard for the Jordanians to agree to the flow of Iraqi oil via Jordan and Israel."
Sources in Jerusalem confirmed yesterday that the Americans are looking into the possibility of laying a new pipeline via Jordan and Israel. (There is also a pipeline running via Syria that has not been used in some three decades.)
Iraqi oil is now being transported via Turkey to a small Mediterranean port near the Syrian border. The transit fee collected by Turkey is an important source of revenue for the country. This line has been damaged by sabotage twice in recent weeks and is presently out of service.
In response to rumors about the possible Kirkuk-Mosul-Haifa pipeline, Turkey has warned Israel that it would regard this development as a serious blow to Turkish-Israeli relations.
Sources in Jerusalem suggest that the American hints about the alternative pipeline are part of an attempt to apply pressure on Turkey.
Iraq is one of the world's largest oil producers, with the potential of reaching about 2.5 million barrels a day. Oil exports were halted after the Gulf War in 1991 and then were allowed again on a limited basis (1.5 million barrels per day) to finance the import of food and medicines. Iraq is currently exporting several hundred thousand barrels of oil per day.
During his visit to Washington in about two weeks, Paritzky also plans to discuss the possibility of U.S. and international assistance for joint Israeli-Palestinian projects in the areas of energy and infrastructure, natural gas, desalination and electricity.
http://www.nowarforisrael.com
http://nogw.com/warforisrael.html
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