War Without End

Alpha

The motivation for Bin Laden's (Al Qaeda) tragic attack on America are found at the following URL (that is if the JINSA/CSP/PNAC Neocons and their Likudite cronies in Israel didn't arrange it instead):

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/articles/2004/01/22/every-morning-every-american-should-read-this-twice.php

Of course the Zionist (Jewish) press/media in the USA does not convey the above to the extent that it should.... Just like it didn't and doesn't with regard to the treacherous Israeli attack on the USS Liberty (www.ussliberty.org ).

Alpha

foppe37 · Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 7:17 pm Post subject: the USA and its European origin

I've been on Whidbey Island, now the headquarters of the USA Navy airforce, NE of Seattle.
I happen to know what this island was like at the end of the 18th century, at the time an artist was sent to record, in paintings, what the Indian world was.

Whidbey Island at the time had a well organised Indian village, with even remparts against attacks.
It was fairly democratic, when the travelling artist asked the chief to be painted his eight wives made such a fuss that he refused. They feared evil spirits, or something like that.
However, when the artist met the chief outside the village he let his portrait be taken.

The next information I have on Whidbey Island is from 1890, when Dutch immigrants from Michigan reached it.
Then there was a catholic mission, the Dutch bought land, not from Indians.
When I was there a few years ago the Indian canoes still were there, but no sign or memorial about the Indians.
So I do not know if Dutch killed or chased them away after 1890, or if they already had been exterminated.
Judging by the canoes I fear my ancestors completed the ehtnic cleansing.

I explained before why the USA entered WW I, because of private war loans to France and Britain, at the time, early 1917, these countries were to lose the war.
I also explained how USA financial interests caused the imposition of the German reparations payments.
These payments, with the Belgian/ French occupation of the Rhineland, and the 1929 Wall Street crash, caused such misery in Germany that a 19th century provincial maniac as Hitler legally got power in jan 1933.

In 1936 Germany was a prosperous country again, without famine.

Mainly economic problems, foreign currency problems, impossible to solve in a diplomatic way, caused Hitler to annex Chechoslovakia, Austria diplomatically, and part of Poland militarily.

Then Churchill, 1939, pushed Chamberlain aside, and declared war.
Churchill's intended occupation of neutral Norway, in order to cut off Germany from iron ore, made Hitler decide to conquer Norway before Britain.
A daring operation succeeded in being there afew days before the British.

Thereafter, Churchill's plans for occupying neutral countries having been made public, Hitler attacked France through the neutral Netherlands and Belgium.
Both countries were occupied until 1944/1945.

The flight of Hitler's deputy Hess in May 1941 to Scotland was to be the conclusion of peace between Britain and Germany.
But Churchill had other ideas than the British ruling class, Hess was arrested.

Roosevelt also had other ideas, in mid 1941 the USA oil boycot of Japan began.
The nearest oil for Japan was Borneo, at the time a Dutch colony.
In Sept 1944 the Dutch government in exile in London decided to join the boycot.
A Japanese mission to Batavia was sent away without result.
Mid Dec 1941 Japan, at the time still having oil for three months, destroyed the USA fleet in Pearl Harbor.
This cleared to way to Borneo oil, the Dutch fleet meant vey little.

By an unimaginable coincidence the three carriers in Pearl Harbor were on excercise, so just obsolete battle ships were destroyed.

So the Dutch government in fact caused the Japanese ccupation of the Dutch East Indies.
The subject still is taboo here, I wonder if more than 100 Dutch know.

But Roosevelt got what he wanted, war with Germany.
Hitler by treaty with Japan was obliged to make war on the USA if and when Japan was at war with the USA.

So indeed, we thank Churchill and Roosevelt, their corresponcendence of 1933, the year in which Hitler legally got to power, still is classified, to this day.

Those buried at Margraten, and at Omaha Beach, and their descendants, do realise that they served a great cause, USA world domination.

Bin Laden · Posted: Mon Mar 22, 2004 11:58 pm Post subject: I Tell You;

"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed,"

"The U.S. government will lead the American people, and the West in general, into an unbearable hell and a choking life."

"America has made many accusations against us and many other Muslims around the world. Its charge that we are carrying out acts of terrorism is unwarranted."

------------------
I Tell You Further: Take the Mossad at their word and you will find the answers to questions that you have not yet begun loudly enough to ask...

“By way of deception, thou shalt do war.”
Motto of the Mossad

Mossad has a total of eight departments, though some details of the internal organization of the agency remain obscure.

* Collections Department is the largest, with responsibility for espionage operations, with offices abroad under both diplomatic and unofficial cover. The department consists of a number of desks which are responsible for specific geographical regions, directing case officers based at "stations" around the world, and the agents they control.
* Political Action and Liaison Department conducts political activities and liaison with friendly foreign intelligence services and with nations with which Israel does not have normal diplomatic relations. In larger stations, such as Paris, Mossad customarily had under embassy cover two regional controllers: one to serve the Collections Department and the other the Political Action and Liaison Department.
* Special Operations Division, also known as Metsada, conducts highly sensitive assassination, sabotage, paramilitary, and psychological warfare projects.
* LAP (Lohamah Psichologit) Department is responsible for psychological warfare, propaganda and deception operations.
* Research Department is responsible for intelligence production, including daily situation reports, weekly summaries and detailed monthly reports. The Department is organized into 15 geographically specialized sections or "desks", including the USA, Canada and Western Europe, Latin America, Former Soviet Union, China, Africa, the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran. A "nuclear" desk is focused on special weapons related issues.
* Technology Department is responsible for development of advanced technologies for support of Mossad operations.

foppe37 · Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 6:23 am Post subject: Israeli services

What is not mentioned are Israeli services.

One is the billing of USA phone calls. This is done by Israeli firms, so they in any case know who calls whom, from and in the USA. Asertions are that secure USA phones do not exist, except a few in the White House.

The second is Israeli phone tap equipment, with software and maintenance by Israeli technicians, using laptops with hebrew keyboards.

Both companies are subsidized by the Insraeli ministry of defence.

In a recnt Dutch court case our supreme court immediately liberated someone of Turkish origin who had been convicted by lower courts to seven years imprisonment, solely based on phone taps.
This man was a Kurd, had worked for the Turkish secret service, but had defected, he did not like what the Turkish CIA did to the Kurds.
He came to the Netherlands, and was arrested later.

His lawyers were able to prove that the Israeli phone tap system could be tampered with, and had been tampered with.
ON what was presented as a mobile phone conversation the sounds of an old fashioned mechanical phone dialling system could be heard.

There is close cooperation between Turkey and Israel, Israeli pilots excercise over Turkey.

But the man had been convicted twice by lower courts.
Our police does not have a clue on how the phone tap equipment operates.
So I think that no Dutch, and wherever in other countries Israeli phone tap systems have been installed, phone conversation is safe, for Mossad.

Alpha · Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 8:57 am Post subject: Richard Clarke's Bombshell

Subj: Richard Clarke's Bombshell
Date: 3/22/04 7:16:50 PM Pacific Standard Time
From: hectorpv@comcast.net

Friends,

Richard Clarke’s Bombshell

I watched Bush’s former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke on CBS TV’s "60 minutes" and his revelations were a bombshell. Let’s repeat: Clarke was not just some war critic or someone in the Bush administration who might not possess full information on American national security strategy--as was the much-smeared Secretary of Treasury Paul O’Neil who said that Iraq was targeted from the start of the Bush administration, a claim that Clarke fully corroborates. Clarke was Bush’s top adviser on counter-terrorism in 2001. He was obviously a central figure in the Bush administration’s thinking about terrorism. His revelations provide more confirmation that Iraq was the target of attack by the Bush neocon war party long before September 11 and that they were grasping for a pretext to publicly justify such an attack. Clarke brings all this information out in his new book, "Against All Enemies."

I have included articles on this issue from "Newsweek," the "Washington Post," and by Justin Raimondo.

I’ll list the major points made by Clarke.

First, Clarke was concerned about al Qaeda early in the administration, but no one else showed interest. Newsweek: "Clarke recounts how on Jan. 24, 2001, he recommended that the new president's national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, convene the president's top advisers to discuss the Qaeda threat. One week later, Bush did. But according to Clarke, the meeting had nothing to do with bin Laden. The topic was how to get rid of Saddam Hussein. ‘What does that tell you?’ Clarke remarked to NEWSWEEK. ‘They thought there was something more urgent. It was Iraq. They came in there with their agenda, and [Al Qaeda] was not on it.’" Newsweek points out that Clarke’s contention that the administration downgraded al Qaeda is backed-up by the fact that "At the Justice Department, Attorney General John Ashcroft downgraded terrorism as a priority, choosing to place more emphasis on drug trafficking and gun violence."

Instead of wanting to deal with al Qaeda in the months prior toe 9/11, the administration wanted to focus on Saddam. Neocon Paul Wolfowitz took the lead in emphasizing Saddam, even though Clarke constantly reported that there was absolutely no evidence of Iraq sponsoring terrorism. Wolfowitz has been the brains behind Rumsfeld and has been called by Time Magazing, the "godfather of the Iraq war." Newsweek article: "Clarke sharply whacks Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as the leader of the Get Saddam squad. When the White House finally did convene a top-level meeting to discuss terrorism, in April 2001, Wolfowitz rebuffed Clarke's effort to focus on Al Qaeda. According to Clarke, Wolfowitz said, ‘Who cares about a little terrorist in Afghanistan?’ The real threat, Wolfowitz insisted, was state-sponsored terrorism orchestrated by Saddam. In the meeting, says Clarke, Wolfowitz cited the writings of Laurie Mylroie, a controversial academic who had written a book advancing an elaborate conspiracy theory that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing." The Mylorie reference is very interesting. A little background: Mylorie is a neocon and her Iraq involvement thesis has been trumpeted by the neocons. She has claimed that al Qaeda is a front for Iraqi intelligence. She emphasizes Saddam’s WMD. Her book was originally published by AEI (American Enterprise Instute ) AEI is a leading neocon think tank. Then Regan Books, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, released the book in paperback. Harper Collins is owned by pro-neocon/pro-Zionist Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the Fox News Channel, which booked Mylroie as an Iraq expert during the build-up to the war. Fox News was the leading media cheerleader for the war. Mylorie fulfilled the same war propaganda purpose as Ahmed Chalabi’s bogus intelligence.

http://slate.msn.com/id/116232/

In the July, 2001, Clarke said that there was considerable communications traffic among al Qaeda operatives, which signaled that some major terrorist event might be coming up. Clarke wanted the Bush administration to focus on this danger, but Bush and the administration did not take any precautionary actions..

When the attack occurred Rumsfeld was talking about attacking Iraq, even though there was no evidence that Iraq was involved in the terrorism attack.

After Sept. 11, the White House pressed Clarke to find evidence that Iraq was involved in the terrorism—Clarke could find none, but there was the implication that he should come up with something.

In the build-up to the attack on Iraq, the administration deceptively continued to suggest that there was a link between September 11 terrorism and Saddam, despite the fact that there was not evidence of Saddam’s involvement. The connection was obviously used for the propagandistic purpose of getting public support for the attack on Iraq. Wolfowitz is presented this view in a phone call to the "Washington Post" regarding Clarke’s statements. "Washington Post": "Wolfowitz, in a telephone interview last night, cited statements by CIA Director George J. Tenet and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell affirming that Iraq once trained al Qaeda operatives in bomb making and document forgery."

Clarke emphasizes that Bush’s focus on Iraq has actually served to increase the terrorist danger. Clarke writes that Bush "launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide."

The US attack on Iraq only confirmed what Osama and the Islamic extremists said about the US and thus simply strengthened the support for terrorism in the Muslim world. At the same time, by having American men and resources bogged down in Iraq, the United States is less able to counter terrorism elsewhere. As Clarke stated in his CBS "60 Minutes" interview: ""But frankly I find it outrageous that the president is running for reelection on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism."

The administration is out to discredit Clarke. Clarke is not a Democrat or in any sense anti-war per se. Clarke is a foreign policy hawk and career government official who served five Presidents – three of them Republicans. And the "Washington Post" points out: "Clarke's disputes with the White House are notable in part because his muscular national security views allied him often over the years with most of the leading figures advising Bush on terrorism and Iraq. As an assistant secretary of state in 1991, Clarke worked closely with Wolfowitz and then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney to marshal the 32-nation coalition that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Clarke sided with Wolfowitz -- against Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- in a losing argument to extend that war long enough to destroy Iraq's Republican Guard. Later, Clarke was principal author of the hawkish U.S. plan to rid Iraq of its nonconventional weapons under threat of further military force."

This doesn’t stop the pro-Bush smearers, who have attacked every other official that has dared to reveal the deceptive inner workings of the Bush administration. Raimondo writes: "The Republican attack machine is trying to paint Clarke as some kind of partisan Democrat – an unlikely characterization of a 30-year career in government at the highest levels, starting out in the Reagan administration. What we are witnessing here is yet the latest episode in an extraordinary series of whistle-blowing accounts by government insiders: Ambassador Joe Wilson, Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, and now Clarke, all patriotic Americans pointing to a dangerous vulnerability." One should add Greg Thielmann, who was director of the strategic, proliferation, and military issues office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research and Secretary of Treasury Paul O’Neill. Significantly the Bush smear machine attacked Paul O’Neill for saying that the pre-911 Bush administration was focused on Iraq, which Clarke has now confirmed. O’Neill was smeared for telling the obvious truth. And the all the members of the Bush administration allowed this smear of one of their former associates to take place without a peep!

But the fact of the matter is that what Clarke reports is not new. It simply confirms information that has come to the fore already. Of course, all this fits in with the fact that the neoconservatives who loomed large in the Bush administration had been planning to attack Iraq for years and simply needed a pretext. [All on the record books—see my piece "The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel http://www.thornwalker.com:16080/ditch/conc_toc.htm ]

Clarke provides additional evidence for the fact the Bush administration neocons sought to attack Iraq and merely looked for a pretext to gain the necessary public and congressional support. Thus they tried to connect Iraq to the September 11 terrorism in order to justify an attack but couldn’t completely achieve this end. While the Bush neocons couldn’t completely use September 11 involvement—though they did imply Saddam’s complicity—they moved on the WMD lies. That they wanted a justification for attacking Iraq would indicate that their fallacious WMD claims were not the result of error. They got the exact results that they wanted. And, of course, the neocons promoted much of the most extreme WMD propaganda through their Office of Special Plans and their touting of the deceptive Ahmed Chalabi. In short, all of the "intelligence errors" caused the neocon war party to get the attack on Iraq that they had ardently sought.

Beyond illustrating the pre-911 goal of attacking Iraq, it is also apparent that the refusal to consider the al Qaeda alerts might have precluded the prevention of this terrorist attack. This issue needs more analysis (and I have not read Clarke’s book), but it certainly could lead to the conclusion that the Bush administration’s relative indifference to this threat facilitated the success of the 911 terrorist act that ultimately set the stage for the attack on Iraq. One can wonder whether this indifference that served to achieve a major policy goal might have been deliberate rather than accidental. But much more evidence is needed for such a conclusion. Of course, the Bush administration is averse to releasing any relevant information dealing with the pre-911 period. And then you have the Mossad living on the same street as chief 911 terrorist Mohammed Atta, and then the Mossad agents taking pictures of the Trade Towers burning from across the Hudson River. And hey I’m moving into dangerous conspiratorial territory here, so I’d better end it all. [Justin Raimondo has put this information together in a short book, "The Terror Enigma: Israel and the September 11 Connection," a brief synopsis can be found at http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/Chronicles/August2003/0803CIA.html

I have written on Israeli involvement at: www.thornwalker.com/ditch/towers_5.htm

www.thornwalker.com/ditch/towers_6.htm ]

_________________________________________

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4571338/

Storm Warnings

NewsweekMarch 29 issue

Bin Laden was a threat, but Clinton never pushed it and Bush seemed more interested in Saddam. What went wrong

David Hume Kennerly / Getty Images

Clear warnings: Clinton administration officials say they bluntly warned the incoming Bush administration of the imminent threat from Al Qaeda

By Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas

NewsweekMarch 29 issue - It was the day after 9/11, and President Bush, like many Americans, was looking for someone to bomb. Wandering into the White House Situation Room, the president pulled aside Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism chief of the national-security staff who had been held over from the Clinton years. According to Clarke, Bush asked: was Iraq responsible for the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington? Bush wanted the FBI and CIA to hunt for any evidence that pointed to Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Clarke recalls that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was also looking for a justification to bomb Iraq. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld was arguing at a cabinet meeting that Afghanistan, home of Osama bin Laden's terrorist camps, did not offer "enough good targets." "We should do Iraq," Rumsfeld urged.

Clarke was skeptical in the extreme. Six days after the president's request, Clarke says, he turned in a classified memo concluding that there was no evidence of Iraqi complicity in 9/11—nor any relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The memo, says Clarke, was buried by an administration that was determined to get Iraq, sooner or later.

Clarke, who was interviewed by NEWSWEEK last week, is telling his story to the world: to "60 Minutes" on Sunday night, in testimony this week to the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks and in his new book, "Against All Enemies," just out. Clarke portrays the Bush White House as indifferent to the Qaeda threat before 9/11, then obsessed with punishing Iraq, regardless of what the evidence showed about Saddam's Qaeda ties, or lack of them.

The Bush administration is already pushing back. A White House official told NEWSWEEK that Bush has "no specific recollection" of the post 9/11 conversation described by Clarke, and that records show the president was not in the Situation Room at the time Clarke recalls. "His book might be called 'If Only They Had Listened to Dick Clarke'," said an administration official.

John Kerry wants everyone to listen to Clarke now. As soon as Clarke's charges began appearing in print, the Democrats' presumptive nominee put them on his campaign Web site. After a rough week when he was mocked by the Bush-Cheney campaign for flip-flopping on the Iraq war, Kerry is glad to turn the tables on Bush. The Bush campaign has been eager to make the election center on Bush's resolve to strike back after 9/11. But Kerry wants to bring the focus back to the nine months before 9/11, when the new president was paying only erratic attention to Al Qaeda.

For Kerry and the Democrats, the catch is that Bill Clinton did no better to tame the terrorist threat during his last years in office. As Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll recently showed in his book "Ghost Wars," those in the national-security bureaucracy under Clinton spent more time wringing their hands and squabbling with each other than going after Osama bin Laden. And Clinton never stepped in and ordered his troops to stop dickering and do the job.

The White House counterterror chief during the late ' 90s and through 9/11 was Dick Clarke. A career civil servant, Clarke was known for pounding the table to urge his counterparts at the CIA, FBI and Pentagon to do more about Al Qaeda. But he did not have much luck, in part because in both the Clinton and early Bush administrations, the top leadership did not back up Clarke and demand results.

Clarke does not absolve Clinton (or himself) of responsibility—the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa happened on Clinton's watch—but he saves his harshest criticism for Bush and his national-security team. In his new book, Clarke recounts how on Jan. 24, 2001, he recommended that the new president's national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, convene the president's top advisers to discuss the Qaeda threat. One week later, Bush did. But according to Clarke, the meeting had nothing to do with bin Laden. The topic was how to get rid of Saddam Hussein. "What does that tell you?" Clarke remarked to NEWSWEEK. "They thought there was something more urgent. It was Iraq. They came in there with their agenda, and [Al Qaeda] was not on it."

A White House official countered that the true fault lay with Clarke for failing to propose an effective plan to go after Al Qaeda. On Jan. 25, this official told NEWSWEEK, Clarke submitted proposals to "roll back" Al Qaeda in Afghanistan by boosting military aid to neighboring Uzbekistan, getting the CIA to arm its Predator spy planes and increasing funding for guerrillas fighting the Taliban. There was no need for a high-level meeting on terrorism until Clarke came up with a better plan, this official told NEWSWEEK. The official quoted President Bush as telling Condi Rice, "I'm tired of swatting flies." Bush, this official says, wanted an aggressive scheme to take bin Laden out.

Clarke sharply whacks Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz as the leader of the Get Saddam squad. When the White House finally did convene a top-level meeting to discuss terrorism, in April 2001, Wolfowitz rebuffed Clarke's effort to focus on Al Qaeda. According to Clarke, Wolfowitz said, "Who cares about a little terrorist in Afghanistan?" The real threat, Wolfowitz insisted, was state-sponsored terrorism orchestrated by Saddam. In the meeting, says Clarke, Wolfowitz cited the writings of Laurie Mylroie, a controversial academic who had written a book advancing an elaborate conspiracy theory that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Clarke says he tried to refute Wolfowitz. "We've investigated that five ways to Friday, and nobody [in the government] believes that," Clarke recalls saying. "It was Al Qaeda. It wasn't Saddam." A spokesman for Wolfowitz described Clarke's account as a "fabrication." Wolfowitz always regarded Al Qaeda as "a major threat," said this official.

If the Bush administration was sounding the alarm about Al Qaeda in its first few months in office, the national-security bureaucracy was not listening. At the Justice Department, Attorney General John Ashcroft downgraded terrorism as a priority, choosing to place more emphasis on drug trafficking and gun violence. That summer, a federal judge severely chastised the FBI for improperly seeking permission to wiretap terrorists; as a result, NEWSWEEK has learned, the Justice Department curtailed a highly classified program called "Catcher's Mitt" to monitor Qaeda suspects in the United States. The CIA and Air Force were caught up in an endless wrangle over who would arm and fly the Predator spy plane (and pay for it, as well as take responsibility for shooting at terrorist targets).

NEWSWEEK RADIO | 3/21/

________________________________

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A13607-2004Mar21?language=printer

washingtonpost.com

Memoir Criticizes Bush 9/11 Response

President Pushed Iraq Link, Aide Says

By Barton Gellman

Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, March 22, 2004; Page A01

On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, according to a newly published memoir, President Bush wandered alone around the Situation Room in a White House emptied by the previous day's calamitous events.

Spotting Richard A. Clarke, his counterterrorism coordinator, Bush pulled him and a small group of aides into the dark paneled room.

"Go back over everything, everything," Bush said, according to Clarke's account. "See if Saddam did this."

"But Mr. President, al Qaeda did this," Clarke replied.

"I know, I know, but . . . see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred."

Reminded that the CIA, FBI and White House staffs had sought and found no such link before, Clarke said, Bush spoke "testily." As he left the room, Bush said a third time, "Look into Iraq, Saddam."

For Clarke, then in his 10th year as a top White House official, that day marked the transition from neglect to folly in the Bush administration's stewardship of war with Islamic extremists. His account -- in "Against All Enemies," which reaches bookstores today, and in interviews accompanying publication -- is the first detailed portrait of the Bush administration's wartime performance by a major participant. Acknowledged by foes and friends as a leading figure among career national security officials, Clarke served more than two years in the Bush White House after holding senior posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He resigned 13 months ago yesterday.

Although expressing points of disagreement with all four presidents, Clarke reserves by far his strongest language for George W. Bush. The president, he said, "failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda despite repeated warnings and then harvested a political windfall for taking obvious yet insufficient steps after the attacks." The rapid shift of focus to Saddam Hussein, Clarke writes, "launched an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq that strengthened the fundamentalist, radical Islamic terrorist movement worldwide."

Among the motives for the war, Clarke argues, were the politics of the 2002 midterm election. "The crisis was manufactured, and Bush political adviser Karl Rove was telling Republicans to 'run on the war,' " Clarke writes.

Clarke describes his book, in the preface, as "factual, not polemical," and he said in an interview that he was a registered Republican in the 2000 election. But the book arrives amid a general election campaign in which Bush asks to be judged as a wartime president, and Clarke has thrust himself loudly among the critics. Publication also coincides with politically sensitive public testimony this week by Clinton and Bush administration officials -- including Clarke -- before an independent commission investigating the events of Sept. 11.

"I'm sure I'll be criticized for lots of things, and I'm sure they'll launch their dogs on me," Clarke told CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview broadcast last night. "But frankly I find it outrageous that the president is running for reelection on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism."

On the same broadcast, deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley said, "We cannot find evidence that this conversation between Mr. Clarke and the president ever occurred." In interviews for this story, two people who were present confirmed Clarke's account. They said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice witnessed the exchange.

Rice, in an opinion article published opposite The Washington Post editorial page today, writes: "It would have been irresponsible not to ask a question about all possible links, including to Iraq -- a nation that had supported terrorism and had tried to kill a former president. Once advised that there was no evidence that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11, the president told his National Security Council on Sept. 17 that Iraq was not on the agenda and that the initial U.S. response to Sept. 11 would be to target al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan."

White House and Pentagon officials who spoke only on the condition of anonymity described Clarke's public remarks as self-serving and politically motivated.

Like former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, who spoke out in January, Clarke said some of Bush's leading advisers arrived in office determined to make war on Iraq. Nearly all of them, he said, believed Clinton had been "overly obsessed with al Qaeda."

During Bush's first week in office, Clarke asked urgently for a Cabinet-level meeting on al Qaeda. He did not get it -- or permission to brief the president directly on the threat -- for nearly eight months. When deputies to the Cabinet officials took up the subject in April, Clarke writes, the meeting "did not go well."

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Clarke wrote, scowled and asked, "why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden." When Clarke told him no foe but al Qaeda "poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States," Wolfowitz is said to have replied that Iraqi terrorism posed "at least as much" of a danger. FBI and CIA representatives backed Clarke in saying they had no such evidence.

"I could hardly believe," Clarke writes, that Wolfowitz pressed the "totally discredited" theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, "a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue."

Wolfowitz, in a telephone interview last night, cited statements by CIA Director George J. Tenet and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell affirming that Iraq once trained al Qaeda operatives in bomb making and document forgery.

"Given what George Tenet and Colin Powell have said publicly about Iraqi links to al Qaeda, I just find it hard to understand how Dick Clarke can be so dismissive of the possibility that there were links between them," Wolfowitz said.

Like Tenet, Clarke was a Clinton holdover who faced initial skepticism from Bush loyalists. But Rice asked him to keep the counterterrorism portfolio and discouraged him from leaving in February 2003.

In the first minutes after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, Rice placed Clarke in her chair in the Situation Room and asked him to direct the government's crisis response. The next day, Clarke returned to find the subject changed to Iraq.

"I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that [Defense Secretary Donald H.] Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq," he writes.

In discussions of military strikes, "Secretary Rumsfeld complained that there were no decent targets for bombing in Afghanistan" -- where al Qaeda was based under protection of the Taliban -- "and that we should consider bombing Iraq."

Clarke's disputes with the White House are notable in part because his muscular national security views allied him often over the years with most of the leading figures advising Bush on terrorism and Iraq. As an assistant secretary of state in 1991, Clarke worked closely with Wolfowitz and then-Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney to marshal the 32-nation coalition that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Clarke sided with Wolfowitz -- against Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- in a losing argument to extend that war long enough to destroy Iraq's Republican Guard. Later, Clarke was principal author of the hawkish U.S. plan to rid Iraq of its nonconventional weapons under threat of further military force.

In his experience, Clarke writes, Bush's description by critics as "a dumb, lazy rich kid" is "somewhat off the mark." Bush has "a results-oriented mind, but he looked for the simple solution, the bumper sticker description of the problem."

"Any leader whom one can imagine as president on September 11 would have declared a 'war on terrorism' and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary [for al Qaeda] by invading," Clarke writes. "What was unique about George Bush's reaction" was the additional choice to invade "not a country that had been engaging in anti-U.S. terrorism but one that had not been, Iraq." In so doing, he estranged allies, enraged potential friends in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and produced "more terrorists than we jail or shoot."

"It was as if Osama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting 'invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq,' " Clarke writes.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

__________________________________

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=2172

March 22, 2004

Is Anybody in Charge?

Former anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke exposes White House's criminal negligence

by Justin Raimondo

In today's world, where state-worship is the secular faith of our age, and the idea that "the government will take care of it" is the centerpiece and source of all political discourse, the revelations of Richard Clarke, former terrorism czar, are nothing less than terrifying:

Clarke, a foreign policy hawk and career government official who served 5 Presidents – 3 of them Republicans – served as Bush II's chief counter-terrorism adviser on the national security staff, and, according to Newsweek,

"Was known for pounding the table to urge his counterparts at the CIA, FBI and Pentagon to do more about Al Qaeda. But he did not have much luck, in part because in both the Clinton and early Bush administrations, the top leadership did not back up Clarke and demand results."

In his new book, Against All Enemies, Clarke recalls a high level meeting held in April, 2001, during which Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz scoffed at the threat posed by Osama bin Laden:

"'Who cares about a little terrorist in Afghanistan?' The real threat, Wolfowitz insisted, was state-sponsored terrorism orchestrated by Saddam Hussein."

The meeting was supposed to have been about implementing Clarke's persistent efforts to do something about Al Qaeda. He had written to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, in late January, 2001, urgently requesting some attention be paid to the growing threat of domestic terrorism orchestrated by Al Qaeda. It wasn't until April, however, that a high-level meeting was convened, at which, according to Clarke, Wolfowitz cited as evidence to the contrary the writings of conspiracy theorist Laurie Mylroie, who has created an entire oeuvre around the idea that Saddam Hussein was responsible not only for the 1993 WTC bombing, but also the Oklahoma City terror incident – and, quite possibly global warming. "We've investigated that five ways to Friday, and nobody [in the government] believes that," replied Clarke. "It was Al Qaeda. It wasn't Saddam."

But facts weren't going to get in the way of the neoconservative drive to invade and conquer Iraq, no matter what the price to truth, common sense, or the national interest. The neocons' relentless single-tracked agenda didn't permit any other conclusion but the one pointing to Saddam as the main danger, even as Al Qaeda gathered in the shadows.

Ideological blindness is one thing: deliberate diversion is another. It is the difference between incompetence and treason. But that difference, in the context of the Clarke revelations, seems to disappear in light of the numerous warnings received by U.S. government officials in the months and days prior to 9/11: As the target date of the terrorists drew nearer, the alarm bells - sounded by foreign intelligence agencies, including the British, the French, the Argentineans, and the Israelis, and some of our own people – were getting louder. But was anybody listening? Was anybody in charge?

Well, er, yes, but they were too busy pursuing the florid fantasies of the eccentric Ms. Mylroie to worry about "a little terrorist in Afghanistan."

Even in the wake of 9/11, this administration's Iraqi-mania didn't abate: indeed, according to Clarke, it was emboldened. And let's be clear, it wasn't just the President's neocon advisors whispering in his ear, cutting him off from reality. As Clarke relates, Bush II was supremely uninterested in the truth:

"'The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.'

"'I said, 'Mr. President. We've done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There's no connection.'

"He came back at me and said, 'Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there's a connection.' And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer."

Clarke compiled a report, which he characterizes as "a serious look," concluding that Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with the events of 9/11. The CIA and the FBI both signed off on it, but when it was sent up to Condie Rice's office on its way to the President's desk, Clarke's report was intercepted "by the National Security Advisor or Deputy" and sent back with the message: "Wrong answer. … Do it again."

With a deftly fortuitous sense of timing, Clarke's book is scheduled for release today [Monday], and is scheduled to testify before the 9/11 Commission on Tuesday. A Sunday night interview with Sixty Minutes fires the first shot in a pyrotechnic display of fireworks, an unprecedented assault directed on an incumbent White House by a disillusioned top official.

Three years after the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history, the seminal event of our era is still wreathed in mystery and mystification. While this administration uses 9/11 as a rationale for perpetual war, we are not supposed to examine the facts surrounding it too closely: having tried and failed to block the extension of the 9/11 Commission's deadline to submit a report, the White House has been parsimonious in doling out documents essential to the mission of the 9/11 investigating commission, which is charged with finding the proximate causes of the gigantic "intelligence failure" that made 9/11 possible. In spite of every attempt to narrow the Commission's mandate, however, Clarke's testimony is bound to elucidate the exact outlines of how and where that failure occurred.

What is interesting to note is that Clarke pinpoints the nixing of his post-9/11 report to the office of the National Security Advisor, run by Ms. Rice's chief deputy, Stephen J. Hadley – who, coincidentally, also played a similar role as bureaucratic bottleneck when it came to the Niger uranium allegations that somehow snuck into the President's 2003 State of the Union.

The Hadley connection doesn't end there, however. A Washington grand jury has recently subpoenaed all records of a heretofore little known entity, the White House Iraq Group, which met weekly in the Situation Room to coordinate the propaganda offensive in the run-up to war, with Hadley and other White House officials and advisors in regular attendance. He's also a source of the bogus "Mohammed Atta in Prague" story of a meeting between an Iraqi agent and one of the 9/11 plotters, a tall tale which he pushed, along with I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, long after it had been discredited. There is hardly a lie told by this administration that doesn't have Mr. Hadley's name signed to it. It was therefore not at all surprising when the administration point man hauled out on Sixty Minutes to provide a counterpoint to Clarke was none other than … Hadley.

The Republican attack machine is trying to paint Clarke as some kind of partisan Democrat – an unlikely characterization of a 30-year career in government at the highest levels, starting out in the Reagan administration. What we are witnessing here is yet the latest episode in an extraordinary series of whistle-blowing accounts by government insiders: Ambassador Joe Wilson, Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, and now Clarke, all patriotic Americans pointing to a dangerous vulnerability.

The neocon hijacking of American foreign policy was the cause of a significant area of blindness in this administration. The blinkered perspective of neocon apparatchiks, who routinely touted the crackpot theories of Laurie Mylroie as if they were sacred dogma, enabled Al Qaeda to hit at our soft underside, sight unseen until after the fact. This fatal loss of vision was due to the distorting effects of neocon ideology, specifically its Iraqi-centric view of the terrorist threat.

Aside from the folk tale of "The Emperor's New Clothes," the only precedent is Soviet Russia in the 1930s, when dictator Joe Stalin endorsed the theories of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko – who rejected Mendelian principles of heredity, and believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited. Since this meant that human beings could be molded by an act of will, and advanced the Soviet goal of creating a "New Soviet Man," Lysenkoism was deemed politically correct by Stalin, and therefore had to be scientifically valid. Lysenkoism halted the development of the science of genetics in the Soviet Union until the late 1950s, when Lysenko was criticized and forced to resign his positions. But the damage had already been done: the progress of Soviet biological science was severely retarded.

A similar retardation process took place in the U.S. when it came to the science – or, rather, the art – or intelligence in the crucial prelude to the 9/11 terror attacks. The neo-Lysenkoism of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, which posited, a priori, the primacy of a threat emanating from Iraq, could not permit the inclusion of contradictory data. Go back to the drawing board, Clarke, Kwiatkowski, and others were told, and come up with the "right" answers.

In the Soviet Union, such "scientific" methods" led to the famines that decimated the country: wheat bred by Lysenko's methods somehow failed to deliver a cornucopia. In the U.S., circa September 2001, however, the neo-Lysenkoism of the top leadership had more spectacular consequences.

CIA director Richard Tenet's extraordinary rebuke to Vice President Dick Cheney on promulgating phony "intelligence" about Iraqi WMD and links to Al Qaeda, coupled with Clarke's assault on the White House's credibility, amount to an intramural fight that is threatening to bring down the Bush White House – and expose the inner workings of a government that, far from taking care of us, appears to be at least as dangerous to us as Al Qaeda. The public-spirited and patriotic motives of these whistle-blowing ex-officials now coming forward was best expressed in a letter to the Washington Post by Karen Kwiatkowski, whose expose of the Office of Special Plans "cooking" of bogus "intelligence" to push us into war led to her smearing by neocon mouthpiece George Will:

"I understand that my speaking out about what I saw in the Pentagon during the run-up to the Iraq war is disconcerting to people who support the Bush administration's foreign policy. I expected to be questioned on the merit and detail of my observations and memories. Surprisingly, not one defender or advocate of our actions in Iraq and associated propaganda has done that. Instead, people so in love with war without having spent a single minute in a military uniform attack me for standing up to be counted. Vituperative? Try cowardly."

Smear and purge: that is the methodology of today's Lysenkoists in pushing their agenda. How like their Soviet predecessors. They cannot produce concrete results: they cannot successfully defend the country against terrorists with their mistaken and profoundly wrongheaded notions. But they sure can put up a fight against their accusers in the court of public opinion.

Oh, don't worry: the government will take care of it. If that is the faith that keeps us from believing in the inevitability of another 9/11, then God help us all.

NOTES IN THE MARGIN

My review of John Le Carre's Absolute Friends, in the latest issue of The American Conservative, is out on newsstands today. They don't always put my pieces online, so if you'd like to read it you should go out and get yourself a copy.

A recent piece by Jacob Heilbrunn in the Los Angeles Times avers that Republicans of the "realist" school are getting antsy about the neoconservatives’ version of "liberation" theology:

"The most profound foreign affairs ideological divide in the 2004 election might not be so much between liberals and conservatives as it will be among conservatives themselves."

Heilbrunn correctly points out that Patrick J. Buchanan and writers for The American Conservative were the first on the Right to raise the banner of Robert A. Taft and a foreign policy that puts America – and not "global democracy" – first. TAC rightly deserves a lot of the credit for this heartening development, and I am proud to note that they have now made me a contributing editor of the magazine. Thank the gods for Taki Theodoracopoulos, and long live TAC!

–Justin Raimondo

_______________________________________

Alpha

Carter savages Blair and Bush: 'Their war was based on lies'
By Andrew Buncombe in Atlanta
22 March 2004

Jimmy Carter, the former US president, has strongly criticised George Bush and Tony Blair for waging an unnecessary war to oust Saddam Hussein based on "lies or misinterpretations". The 2002 Nobel peace prize winner said Mr Blair had allowed his better judgement to be swayed by Mr Bush's desire to finish a war that his father had started.

In an interview with The Independent on the first anniversary of the American and British invasion of Iraq, Mr Carter, who was president from 1977 to 1981, said the two leaders probably knew that many of the claims being made about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction were based on imperfect intelligence.

He said: "There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq recently. That was a war based on lies and misinterpretations from London and from Washington, claiming falsely that Saddam Hussein was responsible for [the] 9/11 attacks, claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And I think that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair probably knew that many of the allegations were based on uncertain intelligence ... a decision was made to go to war [then people said] 'Let's find a reason to do so'."

Before the war Mr Carter made clear his opposition to a unilateral attack and said the US did not have the authority to create a "Pax Americana". During his Nobel prize acceptance speech in December 2002 he warned of the danger of "uncontrollable violence" if countries sought to resolve problems without United Nations input.

foppe37 · Posted: Tue Mar 23, 2004 6:48 pm Post subject: old news bombshell

Since januari 2001 the Bush administration was in illegal negotiations with the Taliban, on an oil pipe line from the Caucasian oil to the Indian ocean, through Afghanistan.

One mrs Helms, of Afghan descent, niece of former CIA director Helms, already had been hired to polish the Taliban image in the USA.

Then sept 11 2001 was there, a Godsend, no more tough negotiations, no more image polishing of Muslim extremists, but a simple occupation.

Alas Caucasian oil had a high sulfur content.

So Iraqi oil seemed better.

Alpha

http://www.nowarforisrael.com

http://www.nogw.com/warforisrael.html

Ahmed Chalabi's Ties To
Mossad And Neocons
By Christopher Bollyn
RumorMillNews.com
4-26-3

When Gen. Abdul Karim Qasim ousted the Iraqi monarchy of King Faisal II in
July 1958, many Iraqis, like the family of Ahmed Chalabi, which had enjoyed close ties with the monarchy, were forced to flee the country.

Today, Chalabi is the man behind the self-declared government that has come
to power in Baghdad.

Chalabi, a non-practising Shia, is reportedly a close friend of the late Shah of Iran, the former Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan and Col. Oliver North of the Reagan

Administration, according to a recent paper on Chalabi for the South Asia Analysis Group titled "Ahmed Chalabi: The Janos Kadar of Iraq" by B. Raman, a Indian intelligence expert.

The head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), Chalabi comes from an
aristocratic Shiite family that was connected to the monarchy of Faisal. The
Iraqi monarchy had been installed by the British when they created the Iraqi
state after the first World War.

Chalabi's father was a member of the Faisal's Council of Ministers and
president of the senate nominated by Faisal and set up to provide the Iraqi monarchy with a democratic facade.

The Chalabi family fled to Jordan when King Faisal II was overthrown in 1958
by Qasim's group of army officers who had allegedly acted in collusion with the
Iraqi Communist Party.

Years later, Chalabi amassed a great deal of wealth as a banker in Jordan. However, in 1989, Chalabi was found guilty of embezzlement and fraud in a military court in Jordan and was sentenced to 22 years. Chalabi reportedly fled Jordan in the trunk of a car with over $20 million.

It was alleged that during his association with the bank Chalabi embezzled nearly $70 million and stashed it in secret Swiss bank accounts.

The financial improprieties that Chalabi was found to have been directly involved in led to the collapse the Jordanian bank he directed, Petra Bank.

At the time of its crash, Petra was the third-largest bank in Jordan, and the Jordanian government was forced to pay out $200 million to depositors who faced the loss of their savings.

In 1992, Mr Chalabi was tried in absentia and sentenced by a Jordanian court to 22 years jail on 31 charges of embezzlement, theft, misuse of depositor funds and currency speculation.
A report by Arthur Andersen subsequently found that Chalabi's Petra Bank's assets had been overstated by some $200 million. Many of the bank's bad loans were to Chalabi-linked companies in Switzerland and Lebanon.

A detailed 500-page Technical Committee Report was subsequently compiled for the Jordanian military attorney-general on June 10, 1990.

In the report Chalabi was named as being the man at Petra Bank who was directly responsible for "fictitious deposits and entries to make the income ... appear larger."

To this day, Chalabi insists that the charges were politically charged and the fact that there has never been formal extradition attempts prove the case was not genuine.

Chalabi is considered by experts to be a long-time collaborator with the CIA
and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) at the Pentagon.

After fleeing Jordan, Chalabi went to Europe and founded the INC in 1992 at a meeting of some anti-Saddam Hussein exiles held in Vienna, Austria. James Woolsey, who became the Director of the CIA under President Bill Clinton, made Chalabi's INC the cutting-edge of the CIA's operations against Saddam Hussein. Chalabi allegedly became Woolsey's blue-eyed boy and the INC became the most favored recipient of CIA funds meant for the overthrow of Saddam, according to Raman.

In the 1980s, when he was associated with the Petra Bank, Chalabi, who was allegedly helping the Mossad, the Israeli external intelligence agency, used to visit Israel secretly.
During those visits, he became close to the late Albert Wohlstetter, who is reputed to be "a godfather of the neoconservative movement in the US," according to Raman.

Chalabi had met Wohlstetter during his student days at the University of Chicago, Raman wrote, but the friendship became close only after their meetings in Israel. Through Wohlstetter, Chalabi became acquainted with Richard Perle, who was Under-Secretary of Defence for international-security policy under President Reagan, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom served under President Ronald Reagan.

Perle, as chief of the Defence Policy Advisory Board, has been a strong supporter of Chalabi, but the CIA and the State Department have serious reservations about him.
Chalabi's criminal past notwithstanding, Chalabi is today being presented as the possible head of an interim Iraqi authority to provide an Iraqi face for what is likely to become an extended U.S. military occupation of Iraq.

"He is tipped to occupy an important post in the US occupation regime in Baghdad to create a new Iraqi intelligence agency, which would be loyal to the USA and protect its national interests," Raman wrote.

On April 16, two close associates of Chalabi said they had been elected
mayor and governor of Baghdad by tribal and religious chiefs acting with the
consent of the U.S. government.

INC General Jaudat Obeidi who, prior to his return to Iraq, had reportedly
lived in exile in Oregon claimed he had been selected mayor of Baghdad. And, with a massive media entourage, Mohammed Mohsen Zubeidi, proclaimed himself governor of a new interim administration for Baghdad.

A spokesman for the U.S. Marines in Baghdad denied that the United States
has recognized anyone to head up a new Iraqi government.

http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=31508

War Without End

The global war against terror, news about the illegal invasion of Iraq, the corporate puppet presidents, the war criminal Tony Blair, September 11th 2001, the USS Liberty and New World Order crimes against humanity.

Christison (former CIA Analyst) on the Neocons - page 2