War Without End

Edithann

November 28, 2005
Scooter's Motive
We're getting closer to the truth
by Justin Raimondo
When someone is accused of a crime, a key component of determining their innocence or guilt is assigning a motive – and this remains the biggest mystery of the Scooter Libby affair. Why did the vice president's then-chief of staff embark on a campaign to expose a CIA agent, Valerie Plame, and put her and her colleagues in danger?

The explanation we've been given, so far, has been that it was revenge for having put the administration's Saddam-has-nukes meme in doubt. By writing that July 6, 2003, op-ed for the New York Times, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, attracted the ire of Libby and other neocons in the office of the vice president, who had been instrumental in formulating and defending that administration talking point.

However, this rationale for Libby's behavior was never all that convincing. Why, after all, would the Cheneyites go to such extremes, particularly since the horse was already out of the barn? The "intelligence" used to rationalize the contention that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear program by procuring uranium "yellowcake" from the African nation of Niger had already been debunked by the International Atomic Energy Agency and exposed as a forgery. It didn't serve any useful purpose to go after Wilson, and his wife, in this manner. As detailed in the indictment, Libby fully understood the risks he was taking: when asked by his then-principal deputy, Eric Edelman, whether administration officials could make the claim to reporters that Wilson was sent to Niger solely because of his wife's efforts, Libby replied that "there would be complications at the CIA in disclosing the information publicly, and that he could not discuss the matter on a non-secure telephone line."

There had to have been more to it than anger at an administration critic. There was something about this particular critic, and his critique, that grated on Libby's nerves and made him want to recklessly lash out – what was it?

Slate's Mickey Kaus has a theory – and a bit of new information to back it up, both of which have received very little attention to date. I must admit that I saw Kaus' item on this matter when it first came out, and planned to write about it, but never did – partly because, as Kaus says, it is potentially "so radioactive that nobody wants to talk about it."

Here is what Kaus wrote a couple of weeks ago:

"Mystery Solved? kf thinks it has resolved the mystery of what NBC is hiding about the crucial Russert/Libby telephone conversation of July 10, 2003. It's known that Libby called Russert to, in Russert's words, 'complain about something that he had been watching on MSNBC, and he was rather agitated about it.' NBC has been strangely non-communicative about which MSNBC program Libby was complaining about, though Michael Crowley, TalkLeft, JustOne Minute, and the New York Times have all suggested that it was Chris Matthews' Hardball, which had been discussing the Iraq War, the faulty WMD intelligence and Joseph Wilson's now-famous trip to Niger. But if that's the case, why couldn't NBC just say it?

"Here's one answer: kf hears, through trustworthy and knowledgeable sources, that in his conversation with Russert Libby gave vent to the archetypal (and wrongheaded) charge that Matthews was animated by anti-Semitism – presumably because Matthews talked a lot about 'neoconservative' Bush aides and war supporters and interviewed guests (such as Pat Caddell) who did too."

NBC, says Kaus, didn't want to get involved in a messy dispute over such a sensitive subject, and, he opines, perhaps prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has specifically asked Russert to keep mum. Such a conversation would have been memorable, at the very least, and Russert's testimony at the trial to that effect would be damaging to Libby.

Another reason I hesitated to write about this was I didn't know quite what to make of it. Okay, I could have had yet another "I-told-you-so" moment, in which I pointed to this column and crowed that my prediction that Libby's defenders would soon be denouncing his prosecution as an "anti-Semitic" pogrom was on the mark, albeit not a bull's-eye. However, that is hardly enough to build an entire column around.

What I didn't understand at the time was how this crystallized and helped explain not only Libby's motive but also the larger context of l'affaire Plame. Kaus, however, in returning to the subject, cites this piece by blogger Tom Maguire that puts it all in perspective. Maguire analyzes a series of statements made by Wilson that clearly put the former ambassador in the camp of those who believe this war was ginned up to benefit Israel, and goes on to assert:

"If we accept that Libby viewed some people as anti-Semitic for the nature of their attacks on the neocons, it is possible, based on these excerpts or others, that Joe Wilson was placed by Libby in that category. And what does that suggest? Well, was anyone convinced by Libby's 'I heard about Plame in June from Cheney, but forgot it completely until I heard it again from Russert in July' defense? I didn't think so. But that already weak-defense becomes absurd if the prosecution can argue that Libby was motivated to 'Get Joe' because he believed Wilson to be anti-Semitic."

Maguire goes on to theorize that this may point to a "lone gunman" theory, in which Libby – motivated by anger at what he viewed as Wilson's anti-Semitism – went on a "get Joe" jihad for intensely personal reasons not shared by anyone else in the administration. "Or," he writes:

"I scarcely dare suggest it, but if this was a conspiracy led by a fellow out to quash the anti-Semites, is there any particular ethnic characteristic we might look for in Libby's co-conspirators? Maybe David Wurmser is a more likely suspect than Karl Rove.

"I doubt the prosecution would ever let it get that far – the last example particularly illustrates that Fitzgerald would be treading on very thin ice if he started suggesting that a Jewish cabal was out to get Wilson. Frankly, I think the whole topic is sufficiently radioactive that neither side will tackle it. However, I am not prosecuting this; I am just trying to figure out what happened, and why."

The problem with Maguire's analysis, at this point, is that he segues too easily into the "Jewish cabal" theme. Kaus rightly disdains this as a canard. As we have seen in the Larry Franklin spy case, you don't have to be Jewish to put Israel first. Franklin, a devout Catholic, and also a devout neocon, didn't need much prompting to hand over [.pdf] vitally important intelligence to AIPAC operatives Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who then passed it on to their Israeli controllers. Aside from that, you have only to listen to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, or one of their brain-dead followers, to see the extent to which the contemporary conservative movement is imbued with the same loyalty to Israel as the Communists used to feel toward the Soviet Union. Neoconservatism, like Christian dispensationalism, is as much a theology as it is an ideology, in style if not in substance. Such a strongly held belief could easily lead anyone, no matter their particular ethno-religious identity, to break the law, betray their country – and worse.

Cheney's office, it is quite true, is permeated through and through with officials formerly associated with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank set up by AIPAC. As Middle East scholar Juan Cole points out: "WINEP wields enormous influence, to the point where it almost functions as a governmental entity." Former Secretary of State Warren Christopher once remarked, according to Cole, that "the State Department owes WINEP a finder's fee for providing it with key personnel," and this is doubly true these days when it comes to the Office of the Vice President. John Hannah, former WINEP director, is Cheney's chief Middle East expert (although he doesn't speak Arabic, and, like so many neocons, his area of expertise is really Sovietology).

David Wurmser, another WINEP alumni, also figures prominently in Cheney's national security team. Wurmser has the added distinction of being a co-author, along with Douglas Feith (former deputy secretary of defense for policy), and Richard Perle, and others, of a now-famous policy paper, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Realm," written in 1996 for Israel's then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The theme of the paper was that Israel had been backed into a corner and needed to break out of its isolation by going on the offensive and changing the strategic balance of the region. With the ultimate goal of destroying Syria and moving back into Lebanon, the authors of "A Clean Break" averred that the road to Damascus had to go through Baghdad. This paper, as Joe Wilson pointed out in a talk (transcript here) given before the publication of his Times op-ed piece, underscored the real source of the administration's war fever:

"The real agenda in all of this of course, was to redraw the political map of the Middle East. Now that is code, whether you like it or not, but it is code for putting into place the strategy memorandum that was done by Richard Perle and his study group in the mid-90's which was called, 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Realm.' And what it is – cut to the quick – is if you take out some of these countries, some of these governments that are antagonistic to Israel then you provide the Israeli government with greater wherewithal to impose its terms and conditions upon the Palestinian people – whatever those terms and conditions might be. In other words, the road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad and Damascus. Maybe Tehran. And maybe Cairo and maybe Tripoli if these guys actually have their way. Rather than going through Jerusalem."

In the question period, Wilson opined that if Americans wake up some day and realize that their soldiers are "dying for Israel," the backlash would undermine our long-standing strategic relationship with Tel Aviv.

The prescience of Wilson's talk is absolutely eerie. When I hear administration officials and their amen corner declare that no one knew there were no WMD, no one knew the Iraq war would strengthen terrorism rather than weaken it, no one could have predicted the insurgency and the mounting antiwar sentiment, my answer is: Wilson did. Like the prophet Cassandra, Wilson channeled the dark future just beginning to stain the edges of the War Party's rosy scenario – all except the instrumental role he and his wife would play in the reaction against the war. He could not have known that, even as he was speaking to a crowd of anti-interventionist activists that day, the War Party was angling to target not only him but his wife – for reasons, if Mickey Kaus' sources are correct, that are becoming clearer by the day.

The country is now going through a process similar to that which occurred after World War I. That war, you'll remember, was to be "the war to end all wars," and U.S. intervention was the result, not of some right-wing Republican militarist's fancy, but of the dedicated belief by a "progessive" internationalist Democrat, Woodrow Wilson, that we had to "make the world safe for democracy." In the aftermath, as liberals surveyed the ruins of Europe, counted up the millions of losses, and weighed it all in the balance, they decided they'd been bamboozled, misled, used, and abused by the War Party in a fatal misapplication of "progressive" ideals. Congress was aroused. Investigations were held. The people were appalled by the influence exerted by the munitions-makers and the war industry, as well as the big financiers, in bringing us into the European war, and an entire generation of American liberals turned against interventionism and militarism. We are going through a similar reevaluation today, only the process is occurring much faster, and the question is now arising until it is heard virtually everywhere: Who lied us into war?

There is much we don't know, as yet, and if our secretive government officials have their way, we'll never know how and why the intelligence was "cooked" – and who were the chefs. The by-now-apocryphal "phase two" of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report [.pdf] on how we gathered prewar intelligence during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq may or may not occur, depending on how Senator Pat Roberts' digestion is that day. A Republican-controlled Congress is unlikely to take up the matter, but luckily our republic is not yet completely comatose, and we have Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the prosecutor in the Libby case, looking into the matter of how a prominent administration critic was targeted by Libby and others in this administration. As we learn more about their motives, we begin to understand how and why the War Party pulled off a coup d'etat, as Colin Powell characterized the actions of the neocons in the vice president's office and the top civilian echelons of the Pentagon. The "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," said Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's former top aide, made critical decisions on its own, without consulting or even informing anyone else. Well, then, who were they consulting and informing? Whose orders were they following?

It's a mystery, but we have one important clue: the role played by Larry Franklin, confessed Israeli spy, who has pled guilty to violating the Espionage Act in handing over classified information to Israel. Working in tandem with Washington's neocon network, Franklin attended a prewar meeting in Rome with a group of Iranians, led by Manucher Ghorbanifar, and also including the head of Italian military intelligence, and a delegation of American neocons. This conclave, according to Italy's La Repubblica, was the fulcrum of the Niger uranium forgeries.

Michael Ledeen, founding president of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, has close ties to Israel – ties he used to set up the mechanism that allowed the Iran-Contra scheme to go forward. According to La Repubblica, Ledeen brokered the transmission of the forgeries from Rome to Washington, where the "intelligence" contained therein was injected into Bush's 2003 State of the Union address in the form of the infamous "16 words."

Another participant in the Rome powwow, neocon ideologue Harold Rhode, has ties to the Libby network. Along with Judith Miller, Rhode is a principal of the Iraqi Jewish Archive – an interest shared by their mutual friend, Ahmed Chalabi. They're all just one big happy family, and they take a natural interest in each other's activities. This explains why Miller's doings during this period were of vital interest to Franklin, as well as to his Israeli handler, as related in Franklin's indictment [.pdf]:

"On or about June 3, 2003, Franklin met with F[oreign]O[fficial]-3 [Israeli embassy chief political officer Naor Gilon] at the POAC [Pentagon Officers Athletic Club], and the discussion centered on a specific person, not in the United Status government, and her thoughts concerning the nuclear program of the Middle Eastern country and, separately, certain charity, efforts in Foreign Nation A."

The subject their discussion was undoubtedly Miller – and this, mind you, at a time when Valerie Plame's identity was just beginning to percolate outward from the vice president's office via Libby's grapevine. It's not at all surprising that Franklin and Gilon should be concerned with Miller, a central figure in the Plame affair: they were all part of the same network, bound together by a common ideology as well as a common interest in covering the tracks of the War Party.

By the time of the Franklin-Gilon tête-à-tête, the tom-toms were already beating – "Get the anti-Semite!" One wonders what else Franklin and his Israeli contact discussed that day, and if the name of a certain female CIA agent came up.

The Libby case is focusing the spotlight on a vicious internecine struggle that wracked the U.S. government in the prelude to war, and it is no doubt true that one side – the neocons – considered their adversaries to be "anti-Semitic." Just as neocon pundits such as Andrew Sullivan, David Brooks, Joshua Muravchik, and Jonah Goldberg have long complained that the word "neocon" is in reality a "code word" for "Jew," so the neocons in the government used the same argument to discredit their internal enemies and energize their campaign to discredit Wilson and "out" his wife in the process. "Anti-Semites," you see, must be punished – and anyone who opposes the neocons' war plans is an "anti-Semite," by definition, especially someone like Wilson, who fully understands the key role played by Israel's partisans in lying us into war.

As in World War I, the pendulum is now swinging away from militarism and interventionism and toward a new understanding of how we get into wars in the first place, and the first question that's being asked is: Who benefits? This time around, the answer, to many, is disquieting – and increasingly undeniable, as we learn more specifics. The outing of Valerie Plame may not have been a covert operation carried out by Israel's fifth column in Washington, designed to take out alleged "anti-Semites" in the CIA – but then we have to assume that someone sure is doing a bang-up job of making it look like that is precisely what happened.

As I have said on many occasions, the process by which we were lied to and lured into the Iraqi quagmire resembles, in all its essentials, a classic disinformation campaign such as would be run by a foreign intelligence operation. The usurpation of authority in the national security bureaucracy, the corruption of the intelligence-gathering process – including the introduction of forged documents – and the deployment of an extensive network both inside and outside of government, all point to a large-scale covert action designed to drag us into war. It wouldn't be the first time a foreign intelligence agency played a key role in getting us into a foreign war, and – as long as the Empire lasts – it won't be the last.

dangerousdna · Posted: Tue Nov 29, 2005 3:59 am Post subject:

Thanks for explaining this Justin Raimondo but many already knew this

Rice told us over 2 years ago Rolling Eyes

Rice: The “security of Israel is the key to security of the world.”Posted 5/14/2003
By Avraham Shmuel Lewin, Israel Correspondent

TEL AVIV – In an exclusive interview with Israel’s daily Yediot Aharonot recently, National Security Adviser Dr. Condoleezza Rice said that the “security of Israel is the key to security of the world.”
http://www.jewishpress.com/news_article.asp?article=2380

Edithann · Posted: Tue Nov 29, 2005 4:59 am Post subject:

dangerousdna · Posted: Tue Nov 29, 2005 5:41 am Post subject:

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j122801.html

100 YEARS AFTER DREYFUSS
Founded as it is on the permanence of Jewish victimology, and the idea that anti-Semitism is inevitable, Zionism thrives when Jewish persecution grows. It is a natural tendency of Zionist propaganda to exaggerate hostility to Jews. The founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, was confirmed in his opinion that it was "futile" to combat anti-Semitism when the infamous Dreyfuss case was at the center of a storm of controversy. Today, however, with the rapid decline and marginalization of anti-Semitism everywhere but in the Middle East, the pressing need for a Jewish state requires more justification.

Alpha

Here is the URL to the above article by Justin Raimondo:

http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=8164

Attacking Syria next is right in accordance with the 'A Clean Break'/war for Israel agenda that esteemed US intelligence author James Bamford discusses on pages 261-269/321 of his 'A Pretext for War' book (the recently released paperback version of 'A Pretext for War' conveys on page 403 how JINSA Israel firster neocon Douglas Feith - pictured at the top of www.nowar.com - had Israeli generals walk to his office at the Pentagon like they owned the place):

Read pages 261-269 of Bamford's 'A Pretext for War' by scrolling down to such at the following URL:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/02/11/a-clean-break-from-james-bamford-s-a-pretext-for-war.php

Syrian Ambassador to US discusses 'A Clean Break'/war for Israel agenda :

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/06/10/syrian-ambassador-mentions-a-clean-break-war-for-israel.php

Read sure to read the last paragraph of the following:

Subject: Where is the Iraq war headed next? - Syria

UP IN THE AIR
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Where is the Iraq war headed next?
Issue of 2005-12-05
Posted 2005-11-28

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/051205fa_fact

In recent weeks, there has been widespread speculation that President George W. Bush, confronted by diminishing approval ratings and dissent within his own party, will begin pulling American troops out of Iraq next year. The Administration’s best-case scenario is that the parliamentary election scheduled for December 15th will produce a coalition government that will join the Administration in calling for a withdrawal to begin in the spring. By then, the White House hopes, the new government will be capable of handling the insurgency. In a speech on November 19th, Bush repeated the latest Administration catchphrase: “As Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.” He added, “When our commanders on the ground tell me that Iraqi forces can defend their freedom, our troops will come home with the honor they have earned.” One sign of the political pressure on the Administration to prepare for a withdrawal came last week, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News that the current level of American troops would not have to be maintained “for very much longer,” because the Iraqis were getting better at fighting the insurgency.
A high-level Pentagon war planner told me, however, that he has seen scant indication that the President would authorize a significant pullout of American troops if he believed that it would impede the war against the insurgency. There are several proposals currently under review by the White House and the Pentagon; the most ambitious calls for American combat forces to be reduced from a hundred and fifty-five thousand troops to fewer than eighty thousand by next fall, with all American forces officially designated “combat” to be pulled out of the area by the summer of 2008. In terms of implementation, the planner said, “the drawdown plans that I’m familiar with are condition-based, event-driven, and not in a specific time frame”—that is, they depend on the ability of a new Iraqi government to defeat the insurgency. (A Pentagon spokesman said that the Administration had not made any decisions and had “no plan to leave, only a plan to complete the mission.”)
A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.
“We’re not planning to diminish the war,” Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Clawson’s views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting—Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower. The rule now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in places where they are sure to win. The pace of commitment, and withdrawal, depends on their success in the battlefield.”
He continued, “We want to draw down our forces, but the President is prepared to tough this one out. There is a very deep feeling on his part that the issue of Iraq was settled by the American people at the polling places in 2004.” The war against the insurgency “may end up being a nasty and murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies would still win,” he said. “As long as the Kurds and the Shiites stay on our side, we’re set to go. There’s no sense that the world is caving in. We’re in the middle of a seven-year slog in Iraq, and eighty per cent of the Iraqis are receptive to our message.”
One Pentagon adviser told me, “There are always contingency plans, but why withdraw and take a chance? I don’t think the President will go for it”—until the insurgency is broken. “He’s not going to back off. This is bigger than domestic politics.”

Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.
Bush’s closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush’s first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President’s religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that “God put me here” to deal with the war on terror. The President’s belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that “he’s the man,” the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reëlection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose.
The former senior official said that after the election he made a lengthy inspection visit to Iraq and reported his findings to Bush in the White House: “I said to the President, ‘We’re not winning the war.’ And he asked, ‘Are we losing?’ I said, ‘Not yet.’ ” The President, he said, “appeared displeased” with that answer.
“I tried to tell him,” the former senior official said. “And he couldn’t hear it.”
There are grave concerns within the military about the capability of the U.S. Army to sustain two or three more years of combat in Iraq. Michael O’Hanlon, a specialist on military issues at the Brookings Institution, told me, “The people in the institutional Army feel they don’t have the luxury of deciding troop levels, or even participating in the debate. They’re planning on staying the course until 2009. I can’t believe the Army thinks that it will happen, because there’s no sustained drive to increase the size of the regular Army.” O’Hanlon noted that “if the President decides to stay the present course in Iraq some troops would be compelled to serve fourth and fifth tours of combat by 2007 and 2008, which could have serious consequences for morale and competency levels.”
Many of the military’s most senior generals are deeply frustrated, but they say nothing in public, because they don’t want to jeopardize their careers. The Administration has “so terrified the generals that they know they won’t go public,” a former defense official said. A retired senior C.I.A. officer with knowledge of Iraq told me that one of his colleagues recently participated in a congressional tour there. The legislators were repeatedly told, in meetings with enlisted men, junior officers, and generals that “things were fucked up.” But in a subsequent teleconference with Rumsfeld, he said, the generals kept those criticisms to themselves.
One person with whom the Pentagon’s top commanders have shared their private views for decades is Representative John Murtha, of Pennsylvania, the senior Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The President and his key aides were enraged when, on November 17th, Murtha gave a speech in the House calling for a withdrawal of troops within six months. The speech was filled with devastating information. For example, Murtha reported that the number of attacks in Iraq has increased from a hundred and fifty a week to more than seven hundred a week in the past year. He said that an estimated fifty thousand American soldiers will suffer “from what I call battle fatigue” in the war, and he said that the Americans were seen as “the common enemy” in Iraq. He also took issue with one of the White House’s claims—that foreign fighters were playing the major role in the insurgency. Murtha said that American soldiers “haven’t captured any in this latest activity”—the continuing battle in western Anbar province, near the border with Syria. “So this idea that they’re coming in from outside, we still think there’s only seven per cent.”
Murtha’s call for a speedy American pullout only seemed to strengthen the White House’s resolve. Administration officials “are beyond angry at him, because he is a serious threat to their policy—both on substance and politically,” the former defense official said. Speaking at the Osan Air Force base, in South Korea, two days after Murtha’s speech, Bush said, “The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. . . . If they’re not stopped, the terrorists will be able to advance their agenda to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, and to break our will and blackmail our government into isolation. I’m going to make you this commitment: this is not going to happen on my watch.”
“The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,” the former defense official said. “He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’ ” He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. “They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” the former defense official said. Bush’s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. “Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,” the former official said, “but Bush has no idea.”

Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. “Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?” another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. “Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?”
“It’s a serious business,” retired Air Force General Charles Horner, who was in charge of allied bombing during the 1991 Gulf War, said. “The Air Force has always had concerns about people ordering air strikes who are not Air Force forward air controllers. We need people on active duty to think it out, and they will. There has to be training to be sure that somebody is not trying to get even with somebody else.” (Asked for a comment, the Pentagon spokesman said there were plans in place for such training. He also noted that Iraq had no offensive airpower of its own, and thus would have to rely on the United States for some time.)
The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps the most significant—and underreported—aspect of the fight against the insurgency. The military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnage they drop, as was routinely done during the Vietnam War. One insight into the scope of the bombing in Iraq was supplied by the Marine Corps during the height of the siege of Falluja in the fall of 2004. “With a massive Marine air and ground offensive under way,” a Marine press release said, “Marine close air support continues to put high-tech steel on target. . . . Flying missions day and night for weeks, the fixed wing aircraft of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing are ensuring battlefield success on the front line.” Since the beginning of the war, the press release said, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than five hundred thousand tons of ordnance. “This number is likely to be much higher by the end of operations,” Major Mike Sexton said. In the battle for the city, more than seven hundred Americans were killed or wounded; U.S. officials did not release estimates of civilian dead, but press reports at the time told of women and children killed in the bombardments.
In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased. Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border. As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war.
The insurgency operates mainly in crowded urban areas, and Air Force warplanes rely on sophisticated, laser-guided bombs to avoid civilian casualties. These bombs home in on targets that must be “painted,” or illuminated, by laser beams directed by ground units. “The pilot doesn’t identify the target as seen in the pre-brief”—the instructions provided before takeoff—a former high-level intelligence official told me. “The guy with the laser is the targeteer. Not the pilot. Often you get a ‘hot-read’ ”—from a military unit on the ground—“and you drop your bombs with no communication with the guys on the ground. You don’t want to break radio silence. The people on the ground are calling in targets that the pilots can’t verify.” He added, “And we’re going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?”
The second senior military planner told me that there are essentially two types of targeting now being used in Iraq: a deliberate site-selection process that works out of air-operations centers in the region, and “adaptive targeting”—supportive bombing by prepositioned or loitering warplanes that are suddenly alerted to firefights or targets of opportunity by military units on the ground. “The bulk of what we do today is adaptive,” the officer said, “and it’s divorced from any operational air planning. Airpower can be used as a tool of internal political coercion, and my attitude is that I can’t imagine that we will give that power to the Iraqis.”
This military planner added that even today, with Americans doing the targeting, “there is no sense of an air campaign, or a strategic vision. We are just whacking targets—it’s a reversion to the Stone Age. There’s no operational art. That’s what happens when you give targeting to the Army—they hit what the local commander wants to hit.”
One senior Pentagon consultant I spoke to said he was optimistic that “American air will immediately make the Iraqi Army that much better.” But he acknowledged that he, too, had concerns about Iraqi targeting. “We have the most expensive eyes in the sky right now,” the consultant said. “But a lot of Iraqis want to settle old scores. Who is going to have authority to call in air strikes? There’s got to be a behavior-based rule.”
General John Jumper, who retired last month after serving four years as the Air Force chief of staff, was “in favor of certification of those Iraqis who will be allowed to call in strikes,” the Pentagon consultant told me. “I don’t know if it will be approved. The regular Army generals were resisting it to the last breath, despite the fact that they would benefit the most from it.”
A Pentagon consultant with close ties to the officials in the Vice-President’s office and the Pentagon who advocated the war said that the Iraqi penchant for targeting tribal and personal enemies with artillery and mortar fire had created “impatience and resentment” inside the military. He believed that the Air Force’s problems with Iraqi targeting might be addressed by the formation of U.S.-Iraqi transition teams, whose American members would be drawn largely from Special Forces troops. This consultant said that there were plans to integrate between two hundred and three hundred Special Forces members into Iraqi units, which was seen as a compromise aimed at meeting the Air Force’s demand to vet Iraqis who were involved in targeting. But in practice, the consultant added, it meant that “the Special Ops people will soon allow Iraqis to begin calling in the targets.”
Robert Pape, a political-science professor at the University of Chicago, who has written widely on American airpower, and who taught for three years at the Air Force’s School of Advanced Airpower Studies, in Alabama, predicted that the air war “will get very ugly” if targeting is turned over to the Iraqis. This would be especially true, he said, if the Iraqis continued to operate as the U.S. Army and Marines have done—plowing through Sunni strongholds on search-and-destroy missions. “If we encourage the Iraqis to clear and hold their own areas, and use airpower to stop the insurgents from penetrating the cleared areas, it could be useful,” Pape said. “The risk is that we will encourage the Iraqis to do search-and-destroy, and they would be less judicious about using airpower—and the violence would go up. More civilians will be killed, which means more insurgents will be created.”
Even American bombing on behalf of an improved, well-trained Iraqi Army would not necessarily be any more successful against the insurgency. “It’s not going to work,” said Andrew Brookes, the former director of airpower studies at the Royal Air Force’s advanced staff college, who is now at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London. “Can you put a lid on the insurgency with bombing?” Brookes said. “No. You can concentrate in one area, but the guys will spring up in another town.” The inevitable reliance on Iraqi ground troops’ targeting would also create conflicts. “I don’t see your guys dancing to the tune of someone else,” Brookes said. He added that he and many other experts “don’t believe that airpower is a solution to the problems inside Iraq at all. Replacing boots on the ground with airpower didn’t work in Vietnam, did it?”

The Air Force’s worries have been subordinated, so far, to the political needs of the White House. The Administration’s immediate political goal after the December elections is to show that the day-to-day conduct of the war can be turned over to the newly trained and equipped Iraqi military. It has already planned heavily scripted change-of-command ceremonies, complete with the lowering of American flags at bases and the raising of Iraqi ones.
Some officials in the State Department, the C.I.A., and British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government have settled on their candidate of choice for the December elections—Iyad Allawi, the secular Shiite who served until this spring as Iraq’s interim Prime Minister. They believe that Allawi can gather enough votes in the election to emerge, after a round of political bargaining, as Prime Minister. A former senior British adviser told me that Blair was convinced that Allawi “is the best hope.” The fear is that a government dominated by religious Shiites, many of whom are close to Iran, would give Iran greater political and military influence inside Iraq. Allawi could counter Iran’s influence; also, he would be far more supportive and coöperative if the Bush Administration began a drawdown of American combat forces in the coming year.
Blair has assigned a small team of operatives to provide political help to Allawi, the former adviser told me. He also said that there was talk late this fall, with American concurrence, of urging Ahmad Chalabi, a secular Shiite, to join forces in a coalition with Allawi during the post-election negotiations to form a government. Chalabi, who is notorious for his role in promoting flawed intelligence on weapons of mass destruction before the war, is now a deputy Prime Minister. He and Allawi were bitter rivals while in exile.
A senior United Nations diplomat told me that he was puzzled by the high American and British hopes for Allawi. “I know a lot of people want Allawi, but I think he’s been a terrific disappointment,” the diplomat said. “He doesn’t seem to be building a strong alliance, and at the moment it doesn’t look like he will do very well in the election.”
The second Pentagon consultant told me, “If Allawi becomes Prime Minister, we can say, ‘There’s a moderate, urban, educated leader now in power who does not want to deprive women of their rights.’ He would ask us to leave, but he would allow us to keep Special Forces operations inside Iraq—to keep an American presence the right way. Mission accomplished. A coup for Bush.”
A former high-level intelligence official cautioned that it was probably “too late” for any American withdrawal plan to work without further bloodshed. The constitution approved by Iraqi voters in October “will be interpreted by the Kurds and the Shiites to proceed with their plans for autonomy,” he said. “The Sunnis will continue to believe that if they can get rid of the Americans they can still win. And there still is no credible way to establish security for American troops.”
The fear is that a precipitous U.S. withdrawal would inevitably trigger a Sunni-Shiite civil war. In many areas, that war has, in a sense, already begun, and the United States military is being drawn into the sectarian violence. An American Army officer who took part in the assault on Tal Afar, in the north of Iraq, earlier this fall, said that an American infantry brigade was placed in the position of providing a cordon of security around the besieged city for Iraqi forces, most of them Shiites, who were “rounding up any Sunnis on the basis of whatever a Shiite said to them.” The officer went on, “They were killing Sunnis on behalf of the Shiites,” with the active participation of a militia unit led by a retired American Special Forces soldier. “People like me have gotten so downhearted,” the officer added.
Meanwhile, as the debate over troop reductions continues, the covert war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to Syria. A composite American Special Forces team, known as an S.M.U., for “special-mission unit,” has been ordered, under stringent cover, to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon had no comment.) “It’s a powder keg,” the Pentagon consultant said of the tactic. “But, if we hit an insurgent network in Iraq without hitting the guys in Syria who are part of it, the guys in Syria would get away. When you’re fighting an insurgency, you have to strike everywhere—and at once.”

Alpha · Posted: Tue Nov 29, 2005 11:05 am Post subject: NO MORE WAR FOR ISRAEL

http://www.nowarforisrael.com

http://nogw.com/warforisrael.html

http://gorillaintheroom.blogspot.com

http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com

Alpha

JINSA/PNAC Israel first Neocons moving against Syria:

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/10/21/jinsa-csp-pnac-neocons-moving-fast-for-action-against-syria.php

Alpha

Bush Owns the OSP and the Broken Iraqi Pottery
by Ahmed Amr
(Monday November 28 2005)

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"We won’t hear the fat lady sing until we see Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney testifying under oath about the OSP. When that day comes, the fat lady will sound a lot like George Bush."

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After two long years of dodging and weaving, the Bush administration is finally being held to account for fixing, twisting, exaggerating and cherry picking pre-war WMD intelligence. So far, the White House has responded to these charges with pleas of innocence and assertions that hostilities were initiated only as a last resort and based on the best information available at the time. Since the Libby indictment, the administration and its media cronies have launched an aggressive campaign to convince an increasingly skeptical public that Bush honestly believed that Saddam possessed WMD stockpiles and was behind the 9/11 atrocities.
One positive aspect of this new White House strategy is that Dick Cheney is no longer free to insinuate that Iraq had lethal arsenals of unconventional weapons. Until very recently, Cheney continued to propagate the ridiculous notion that Saddam was involved in the planning and execution of the 9/11 terrorist assaults. This is no small retreat for a man who claimed that “It's been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack.” This, after all, is the very same Cheney who told us on Aug. 26, 2002 that "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction."
We should all be thankful for small favors but there remains the single most important question: did the administration get the intelligence wrong or did they deliberately and systematically cook the books?
When George Bush claims both ignorance and naiveté – who amongst us can provide convincing evidence to prove a contrarian thesis? To make a case that Bush and Cheney systematically lied us into a war of choice, one has to provide iron clad proof that the pre-war intelligence was fabricated, manipulated and distorted and that both men were fully aware of the cherry picking operation going on in their front yard.
By all accounts, Cheney was personally involved in the intelligence gathering process and spent an inordinate amount of time in Langley. The CIA analysts – despite enormous pressure – refused to give credibility to the neocon contention that Saddam was behind 9/11 or in any way connected to Al Qaeda. So, why then did our President of Vice and Torture continue to spread the unfounded and incredible idea that Iraq was providing aid and comfort to Bin Laden and that Saddam had set up WMD training camps for Al Qaeda terrrorists? More to the point, why is it so reprehensible and irresponsible to call Cheney a serial liar?
Despite the daily accumulation of evidence that the pre-war intelligence was deliberately corrupted, the White House continues to market the Rovian spin de jure which goes something like this. “We had credible intelligence that Saddam had WMD stockpiles. After 9/11, we couldn’t take the chance that he might hand them over to Bin Laden. Other intelligence agencies around the world concurred with our assessments and we shared all available information with Congress before they voted to support the invasion. If we were wrong, so was the rest of the world. We were taken in by the Chalabi crowd and had no reason to suspect that they were duping us. In any case, what’s done is done. We have to look forward - not rehash the past and waste time on revisionist history. Our mission is to defeat the insurgents and we will not waiver until we achieve a decisive victory. We can’t publicly define the parameters of victory because that will only embolden the enemy. If we falter, Iraq will fall in the hands of Al Zarqawi and become a base for exporting terrorism. It is irresponsible and reprehensible to suggest that this administration lied to the American people. We intend to vigorously contest this vicious slander which originated from the usual suspects on the radical left coast. Trust us. We did not deliberately fix the intelligence to make a case for a war of choice. We went to war as a last resort and only after all other options had been exhausted. This smear campaign is providing aid and comfort to the enemy and confusing our brave lads who are fighting the good fight to spread the blessings of democracy to the people of the Middle East.”
You have to give Karl Rove and his cronies credit for their sheer audacity and their stalinist discipline in communicating the party line. Even when their defense strategy rests entirely on a claim of stupidity and ignorance, they like to show off their talents for spin. It doesn’t hurt that they have legions of embedded pundits to amplify their message. Time will prove that Bob Woodward and Judith Miller were no abberations. Even as you read these words, dozens of Woodward and Miller clones are busy doing stenography chores for Rove in yet another campaign to evade answering some very basic questions. In the CNN and FOX accounts, you might detect a few slight deviations from Rove’s talking points. But inevitably, these neocon media operatives will all deliver the same essential message that “it is an outrageous canard to suggest that the president deliberately and systematically decieved the American people.”
When senior public officials make insistent and repetitive assertions about any given subject, people assume that they know what they’re talking about. When their point of view is reinforced by the politicians of the ‘loyal opposition’, their contentions become unassailable. Add to the mix a few dozen mass media operatives who act as uncritical conduits for their message and you end up with the gospel truth.
It is easy enough to prove that Cheney is a one man canard factory. But contesting the claim that Bush is just a gullible fool is a heavier burden. It doesn’t help that many of the president’s detractors on the left continue to lampoon the man as an idiot – the kind of idiot who managed to convince 90 per cent of Americans that they faced an imminent danger of witnessing Iraqi nuclear mushroom clouds from their front porch.
Caught between Iraq and a hard place, the administration is now challenging its critics to provide hard evidence that the president was a willingly and competent participant in the plan to decieve the public with false claims that Iraq posed a national security threat to the United States of America. Let me predict that their final point of retreat will be to claim that Bush was duped by a professional liar – the most powerful President of Vice in American history.
Blaming the whole Iraqi mess on Cheney and his neocon advisers doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Let’s start with the fact that Bush had access to the same intelligence as the Brits. It’s fair to assume that the Robin Cook was privy to the same intelligence as Tony Blair. I single out the British Foreign Minister because the administration invariably places MI5 at the top of the list of foreign intelligence operatives that allegedly concluded that Iraq had WMD capabilities and posed an imminent threat to the ‘civilized world.’ Let’s not forget that the president’s infamous ‘yellow cake’ uranium claim was attributed to the British government.
To debunk the “every body thought Iraq had WMDs” argument, it is worth quoting the late Robin Cook at length.
“It seems almost cruel to remind those who sold the case for the Iraq war of what they claimed at the time. But it is necessary, because they appear to be forgetting it themselves. President Bush was definite and apocalyptic: "Saddam is building and hiding weapons that could enable him to intimidate the civilized world." Donald Rumsfeld went one better: "We know where they are." On the eve of war, Tony Blair was equally specific that Saddam Hussein had the real thing: "Saddam has chemical and biological weapons."
The case that George Bush and Tony Blair made for war was that containment had failed and that we must launch a pre-emptive strike before Saddam used his imaginary weapons. Indeed, the claim that Saddam already had weapons of mass destruction ready for use was central to their argument that military action must be taken urgently. As Donald Rumsfeld warned in alarmist terms, "within a week, or a month, Saddam could give his WMD to al-Qaida".
If Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, there was no urgent need to invade Iraq. George Bush and Tony Blair could have given Hans Blix the extra few months for which he pleaded to finish his job and prove Saddam was no threat. What created real urgency in Washington to start the invasion may have been the dawning realisation that Hans Blix was about to remove their pretext for war. “
When the phantom WMD stockpiles failed to materialize, Robin Cook was fully entitled to point out that the exhaustive CIA search "establishes that Iraq had no stockpile, no biological agents, no chemical feedstocks, no plants to manufacture them and no delivery systems to fire them. Saddam was no threat to us and had no weapons of mass destruction to pass to terrorists. Brushing the UN inspectors aside in order to go to war on false intelligence was a colossal blunder."
Both George Bush and Tony Blair knew what Robin Cook knew. The president also had contrarians among his staff – like Colin Powell – who debunked most of the suspect intelligence cooked up by Scooter Libby and the neocon operatives in the Office of Special Plans. We now know that Bush set up the White House Iraq Group and specifically tasked it with the mission to market the war in August of 2002. We have the Downing Street Memos. And we have reports that the American and British military started escalating military strikes against Iraq long before the actual invasion.
Still, the President continues to maintain that he made his decision to go to war based on the same intelligence that was provided to Congress. It is not my purpose to defend Kerry, Clinton, Biden, Lieberman, or any of the other willing enablers in the ‘loyal opposition.’ They are as deeply entrenched in the war party as Dick Cheney. Whether they were recipients of the same intelligence as Bush would hardly have made a difference. They supported the war for purely opportunistic reasons and because they march to the tune of the Likudnik neocons embedded in the Democratic Party. If you want to know why the Democratic Party ignores the overwhelming opposition to the war among its rank and file, educate yourself on the Democratic Leadership Committee, the neocon party within the party. The neocons in the DLC call themselves neo-liberals. Same difference. Until very recently, the Kerry-Clinton-Biden-Lieberman DLC cabal was prodding Bush to escalate the conflict in Iraq by sending more troops. Notice how quickly they distanced themselves from Rep. John Murtha when he proposed an orderly and swift withdrawal of American troops.
Even so, the claim that Congress had access to the same intelligence as the president is pure nonsense. Most of them apparently made their decision to authorize the war after reviewing a five page summary of intelligence that had already been thoroughly corrupted by Douglas Feith, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and the Office of Special Plans.
At this late date, why is it so important to prove that Bush was a key player in orchestrating the intelligence fixing operation? Because as the leader of the wrecking crew that created the disaster in Iraq – he is hardly equipped to lead the clean up operations. In the effort to cover up his role in the WMD hoax, Bush continues to make discredited arguments about why we invaded Iraq. The president’s judgment about where we are and where to go from here is impaired by his desire to conjure up an end game that can be sold as a ‘victory.’
Consider Bush’s argument that casting a little light on the corruption of pre-war intelligence would undermine the military. Here is my two-word rebuttal: John Murtha. The congressman’s defection from the war party is significant precisely because the powers that be understand that he was talking for the brass. If the generals believe that this venture is going badly, we should all pay attention. As a general rule, military officers do not involve themselves in public policy debates. But their concerns about the folly of ‘staying the course’ have obviously been communicated to Murtha – who has a well deserved reputation of being a defense hawk and a voice for the rank and file. Murtha is also a man who keeps the company of generals and he is privy to their private assessments of the situation on the ground.
The president continues to pedal the silly notion that if American forces withdraw from Iraq – Zarqawi and Bin Laden would move in to fill the vacuum. First of all, let’s not forget that we have a Jihadist element because we have an insurgency that came about as a result of the invasion. Even by Pentagon estimates, the foreign jihadists represent less than five per cent of the insurgents. If they choose to continue causing havoc after an American withdrawal, the prospect that they could eventually take over Iraq is too negligible to merit serious consideration. Their support among the population is very limited and directly tied to the presence of foreign occupation forces on Iraqi soil. Just like in Bosnia, the strength and role of these elements has been vastly exaggerated and they will most likely vanish from the scene once the occupation ends.
If there is one legitimate concern about what could eventually happens in Iraq – it is the prospect of civil strife. It is not quite clear whether the continued presence of foreign troops increases or diminishes the chances of a civil war that might already be in progress. It doesn’t help matters that the coalition has allowed the police and army to be infiltrated by the Badr brigades and the Peshmerga. Entire units of the new Iraqi army are now made up of Shiites or Kurds. The Police moonlight as death squads and are brazen enough to operate torture centers right in the heart of Baghdad.
One of the obligations of an occupation army is to provide security for the population under their control. In Iraq, the British and American forces are mainly concerned with protecting their own soldiers. We have tens of thousands of soldiers in Iraq primarily because we have 160,000 military personnel to protect. The main mission of American forces in Iraq is ‘force protection’. It is a policy that has resulted in rules of engagement that contribute to high civilian casualties. That, in turn, ends up fueling the insurgency.
In any case, even at the risk of civil war, the Iraqis want an end to foreign occupation. According to a recent poll comissioned by the British government, 80% of Iraqis want an immediate end to the occupation. Which puts them on the same wave length as the 63% of Americans who want to bring the troops home. The recent Cairo meeting between representatives of all Iraqi factions also called for the withdrawal of coalition forces. So, just two weeks before a national elections, Iraqi politicians are competing for the votes of the vast majority of Iraqis who want an immediate end to the occupation. That should tell us something.
The bottom line is that Bush doesn’t have a leg to stand on. There was no good reason to invade and there is no sound rationale for the continued presence of foreign forces on Iraqi soil. The real fear in the Bush administration is that exiting now would leave Iran as the only winner in this conflict. Try to explain that to the American people.
Whether he likes it or not, Bush will have very little say in the final outcome of what transpires in Iraq. The leadership of the Shia community has long standing ties with Tehran. No amount of occupation is likely to dent such intimate relationships. These are connections that go back all the way to Ayatollah Khomeni who founded and funded SCIRI, an exile para-military organization that has emerged as the largest party in post-war Iraq. The SCIRI leadership and it military wing – The Badr Brigades – were recruited, trained and armed by Iran. I don’t think the prospect of leaving Iraq in the hands of Tehran’s Iraqi allies is exactly what Bush had in mind when he decided to topple Saddam. Just chalk it up as another one of those unintended consequences of ‘pre-emptive’ wars.
Which brings us back to why it is so vital to investigate the pre-war corruption of intelligence. The price of this quagmire in blood and treasure has been too high and the rewards are nowhere near the delusional expectations of the neocon prophets. To borrow a neocon phrase, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Lewis Libby, Michael Ledeen and Ken Adelman were ‘wildly off the mark.’ One of their patron saints and willing enablers was non other than Dick Cheney. Another was Donald Rumsfeld. Yet another was George Bush, the man ultimately responsible for their foul produce.
And then there is the small matter of how George Bush decided to conduct the war. Starting with the ‘Shock and Awe’ campaign that incinerated thousands of innocent Iraqis, the president moved on to construct torture chambers in Abu Ghraib and then turned his attention to converting Fallujah into a modern day Guernica. The country is crawling with forty thousand foreign mercenaries who are a law unto themselves and are not subject to the Geneva Convention. Sectarian Shia and Kurdish militias have been empowered and allowed to infiltrate the ranks of the new Iraqi Army and the Police.
They now roam the streets on death squad errands fully camouflaged in Iraqi army and police uniforms. After failing to find Iraqi WMD stockpiles, Bush imported American white phosphorus ammunition, depleted uranium shells, napalm and cluster bombs and used them as weapons of urban warfare. In the process he squandered the lives of over 2,100 young Americans and uncounted thousands of Iraqis.
Even at this late date, we have very little definitive information on why Bush really invaded Iraq. But we do know how he obtained a carte blanche license to create this catastrophe. He did it by convincing the American public that we were going to disarm Saddam of his WMD arsenal before he handed them to Bin Laden. It was the president who was the tip of the spear in the campaign to systematically bombard us with incessant lies about Iraq’s military capabilities. He consistently and consciously exploited the tragedy of 9/11 to scare the nation into war.
Let there be no doubt, that there is readily available hard evidence of Bush and Cheney’s culpability in corrupting the intelligence gathering process. As Lawrence Wilkerson has made clear, there are also paper trails to document how the American military was authorized to use torture and ignore the Geneva Convention. Unfortunately, much of the evidence is still locked up in the Office of Special Plans. For two years, the administration’s congressional allies have obstructed the investigation into this rogue Pentagon operation where the intelligence hoax was fabricated. For very good reasons, Bush has invested considerable effort derailing all inquiries into the activities of this WMD fib factory. Bush owns the OSP just as surly as he owns the broken Iraqi pottery. The OSP is the address where you will find answers to who fabricated the WMD hoax, why they felt the need to cook the books and who authorized the operation? There you will also find details of the elaborate propaganda campaign that involved wholesale leaks to neocon operatives in a few favored media outlets.
We won’t hear the fat lady sing until we see Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney testifying under oath about the OSP. When that day comes, the fat lady will sound a lot like George Bush.
Notes in the Margin: The cover-up of the OSP would not be possible without the active collaboration of Arthur Sulzberger, Donald Graham, Rupert Murdoch and other media tycoons. The fact that the OSP scandal is not playing 24/7 on CNN and FOX is certain proof that these lap dogs don’t hunt and won’t bark unless they are on patrol with an officially sanctioned war party. If anything good can come out of this useless war, let us hope that it will permanently cripple the monopoly media franchises held by the New York Times, The Washington Post, FOX and CNN. The Iraq war enriched the coffers of the embedded media barons who, along with Halliburton, stand accused of war profiteering. Does anybody seriously believe that Judith Miller and Bob Woodward were not intimately familiar with the Office of Special Plans or the White House Iraq Group? Is it even sane to assume that Woodward and Miller were the only mainstream ‘journalists’ actively marketing the invasion of Iraq? Without naming a single source, Woodward and Miller can write entire books about the OSP and the systematic corruption of intelligence. But that’s not part of their job description.
If you want to know what Judith Miller really does for a living, read this Rolling Stones article on Miller and James Bamford and how they sold the war.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/_/id/879
8997?rnd=1133173267750&has-player=true&version=6.0.8.1024

Alpha · Posted: Tue Nov 29, 2005 7:39 pm Post subject:

Jewish Supremacist head of Republiconned Party parties....

Take a look at the AIPAC connected Jewish supremacist who is the head of the Republican Party (a full blown Israel first traitor to America as he parties with fellow Jews as Americans are dying for Israel in Iraq):

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2005/11/29/when-the-going-gets-tough_n_11388.html

http://www.nowarforisrael.com

http://nomorewarforisrael.blogspot.com

Alpha · Posted: Tue Nov 29, 2005 7:42 pm Post subject:

Lied to FBI, Committed Perjury, Obstructed Justice…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2005/10/28/lied-to-fbi-committed-pe_n_9672.html

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Senate asks Pentagon to probe role of Feith's OSP

http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/11/10/senate-asks-pentagon-to-probe-feith-role-on-iraq.php

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.

AS RAIMONDO SAYS..IT'S ALL BEEN FOR ISRAEL!