| Author | Message | | Anglo Thug | | Posted: Mon Sep 04, 2006 9:54 pm Post subject: From 911 to Afghanistan and onto Iraq |
| From 911 to Afghanistan and onto Iraq
Cooking up the case for war. How the warmongers in Washington and London fixed the facts to start a war.
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Please sign the petition to prosecute War Criminal Tony Blair | |  | | DanielDives | | Posted: Mon Sep 11, 2006 12:11 am Post subject: |
| Cheney defends actions since 9-11, Cheney was a leading advocate of the Iraq war
@ http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/1E7A0ADB-539E-4DFF-A4D6-D26CD8F123A9.htm
Speaking a day before the fifth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, Dick Cheney, the US vice-president, defended Bush's decision to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan and said that Americans are now safer at home than ever before.
Cheney told NBC television's Meet The Press on Sunday, pointing out that there have been no al-Qaeda attacks on US soil since September 11, 2001: "We've done a helluva job here at home in terms of homeland security.
"I don't know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years of defeating the efforts of al-Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans.
"You have got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right," he said.
Cheney said the US had done a good job on "homeland security, in terms of the terrorist surveillance programme we put in place, the financial tracking we put in place, and because of our detainee policy".
Iraq war
Cheney also strongly defended the decision by the government of George Bush, the president, to invade Iraq in 2003.
The invasion was "absolutely the right thing to do," he said. "Because if we weren't there, if Saddam Hussein were still in power, the situation would be far worse than it is today."
Cheney admitted the situation in Iraq is "difficult," but said that without the invasion, Saddam would have posed a significant threat to the US.
"He would be sitting on top of a pile of cash" from high oil prices, Cheney said.
"He would be a major state sponsor of terror. To suggest, somehow, that the world is not better off by having Saddam Hussein in jail, I think, is just dead wrong."
Resistance surprised Cheney
Cheney however said that the strength of the Iraqi fighters had taken the US government by surprise.
"I think that there is no question that the insurgency has gone on longer and been more difficult than I expected," he said.
"The battle against Saddam Hussein and his forces was over in a relatively short period of time. What obviously has developed is the insurgency [which] has been long and bloody.
But Cheney also said that 2005 would be seen as a turning point, in the war.
"That's the point at which the Iraqis stepped up, established their own political process, wrote a constitution, held three national elections and basically took on the responsibility for their own fate and future," he said.
Rice backs Cheney
In a separate interview with CNN on Sunday, Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, said that the US might yet uncover evidence of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.
"There were ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda," she said.
"Are we learning more now that we have access to people like Saddam Hussein's intelligence services? Of course we're going to learn more."
A Senate report released on Friday disclosed for the first time that a CIA assessment in October 2005 said Saddam's government "did not have a relationship, harbour or turn a blind eye toward" al-Qaeda operative Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or his associates.
Al-Zarqawi was based in Iraq prior to the 2003 US invasion - but in Kurdistan, an autonomous region outside the direct control of Saddam's government.
Democrat opposition
Opposition Democrat politicians have argued that the Iraq war has wasted billions of dollars which could have been used to improve domestic security.
Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said Bush had sought to use the anniversary of the attacks for political gain ahead of November's mid-term elections.
"We think the president has played too much politics. They think they can't win the elections unless they talk about terrorism all the time," Dean said.
Dean said the administration had got bogged down in Iraq when it should have been going "full-scale" after Osama bin Laden.Agencies | | | | DanielDives | | Posted: Wed Sep 13, 2006 2:32 pm Post subject: |
| Tomgram: Crashing the Plane of State into Iraq
The Real Link Between 9/11 and Iraq (Finally) Revealed
By Tom Engelhardt @ http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=120725 where you alos will find all the links to the information mentioned in this article.
You've heard the President and Vice President say it over and over in various ways: There was a connection between the events of September 11, 2001 and Iraq. Let's take this seriously and consider some of the links between the two.
Numbers and comparisons
*At least 3,438 Iraqis died by violent means during July (roughly similar numbers died in June and August), significantly more than the 2,973 people who died in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
*1,536 Iraqis died in Baghdad alone in August, according to revised figures from the Baghdad morgue. That's over half the 9/11 casualties in one city in one increasingly typical month. According to the Washington Post, this figure does not include suicide-bombing victims and others taken to the city's hospitals, nor does it include deaths in towns near the capital.
*By the beginning of September, 2,974 U.S. military service members had died in Iraq and in the Bush administration's Global War on Terror, more than died in the attacks of 9/11. (Twenty-two more American soldiers died in Iraq in the first 9 days of September; at least 3 in Afghanistan.)
*Five years later, according to Emily Gosden and David Randall of the British newspaper, the Independent, the Bush administration's Global War on Terror has resulted in, at a minimum, 20 times the deaths of 9/11; at a maximum, 60 times. It has "directly killed a minimum of 62,006 people, created 4.5 million refugees and cost the US more than the sum needed to pay off the debts of every poor nation on earth. If estimates of other, unquantified, deaths -- of insurgents, the Iraq military during the 2003 invasion, those not recorded individually by Western media, and those dying from wounds -- are included, then the toll could reach as high as 180,000." According to Australian journalist Paul McGeough, Iraqi officials (and others) estimate that that country's death toll since 2003 "stands at 50,000 or more -- the proportional equivalent of about 570,000 Americans."
*Last week, the U.S. Senate agreed to appropriate another $63 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, where costs have been averaging $10 billion a month so far this year. This brings the (taxpayer) cost for Bush's wars so far to about $469 billion and climbing. That's the equivalent of 469 Ground Zero memorials at full cost-overrun estimates, double that if the memorial comes in at the recently revised budget of $500 million. (Keep in mind that the estimated cost of these two wars doesn't include various perfectly real future payouts like those for the care of veterans and could rise into the trillions.)
*In 2003, with its invasion of Iraq over, the Bush administration had about 150,000 troops in Iraq. Just under three and a half years later, almost as long as it took to win World War II in the Pacific, and despite much media coverage about coming force "draw-downs," U.S. troop levels are actually rising -- by 15,000 in the last month. They now stand at 145,000, just 5,000 short of the initial occupation figure. (Pre-invasion, top administration officials like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz took it for granted that American troop levels would be drawn down to the 30,000 range within three months of the taking of Baghdad.)
Reconstruction
While Americans are planning to remember 9/11 with four vast towers and a huge, extremely costly memorial sunk into Manhattan's Ground Zero, Baghdadis have been thinking a bit more practically. They are putting scarce funds into constructing two new branch morgues (with refrigeration units) in the capital for what's now most plentiful in their country: dead bodies. They plan to raise the city's morgue capacity to 250 bodies a day. If fully used, that would be about 7,500 bodies a month. Think of it as a hedge against ever more probable futures.
While the various New York memorial constructions can't get off (or into) the ground, due to disputes and cost estimate overruns, what could be thought of as the real American memorial to Ground Zero is going up in the very heart of Baghdad; and unlike the prospective structures in Manhattan or seemingly just about any other construction project in Iraq, it's on schedule. According to Paul McGeough, the $787 million "embassy," a 21-building, heavily fortified complex (not reliant on the capital's hopeless electricity or water systems) will pack significant bang for the bucks -- its own built-in surface-to-air missile emplacements as well as Starbucks and Krispy Kreme outlets, a beauty parlor, a swimming pool, and a sports center. As essentially a "suburb of Washington," with a predicted modest staff of 3,500, it is a project that says, with all the hubris the Bush administration can muster: We're not leaving. Never.
Record-breaking Months
*Roadside bombs (or IEDs), "the leading killer of U.S. troops," rose to record numbers this summer -- 1,200 in August, quadrupling the January 2004 figures according to the Washington Post, while bomb and attack tips from Iraqi citizens fell drastically. They plummeted from 5,900 in April to 3,700 in July. ("It will improve once it's not so darn lethal to go out on the street," was the optimistic observation of retired Army Gen. Montgomery C. Meigs, director of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization.)
*According to a recently released quarterly assessment the Pentagon is mandated to do for Congress, Iraqi casualties have soared by a record 51% in recent months, quadrupling in just two years.
*From the same report, monthly attacks on U.S. and allied Iraqi forces rose to about 800, doubling since early 2004. In Anbar Province, the heartland of the Sunni insurgency (where a "very pessimistic" secret Marine Corps assessment indicates that "we haven't been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically -- and that's where wars are won and lost…"), attacks averaged 30 a day.
*A sideline record in the War on Terror: Afghanistan's already sizeable opium crop is projected to increase by at least 50% this year and would then make up a startling 92% of the global supply. According to Antonio Maria Costa, the global executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, those supplies would exceed global consumption by 30% -- so other records loom. (Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, the investigation into the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden has hit a record low. His trail has gone "stone cold… U.S. commandos whose job is to capture or kill Osama bin Laden have not received a credible lead in more than two years.")
The Iraqi Condition
Along with civil war, the ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods, the still-strengthening insurgency, and the security situation from hell, Iraqis are also experiencing soaring inflation, possibly reaching 70% this year (which would more than double last year's 32% rise); stagnant salaries (where they even exist); an "inert" banking system; gas and electricity prices up in a year by 270%; massive corruption ("An audit sponsored by the United Nations last week found hundreds of millions of dollars of Iraq's oil revenue had been wrongly tallied last year or had gone missing altogether"); lack of adequate electricity or potable water supplies; tenaciously high unemployment, ranging -- depending upon the estimate -- from 15-50/60% (the recent Pentagon report to Congress offers Iraqi government figures of 18% unemployment and 34% underemployment); acute shortages of gasoline, kerosene, and cooking gas in the country with the planet's third largest oil reserves, forcing the Iraqi government to devote $800 million in scarce funds to importing refined oil products from neighboring countries and making endless gas lines and overnight waits the essence of normal life ("Filling up now requires several days' pay, monastic patience or both…"); an oil industry, already ragged at the time of the invasion, which has since gone steadily downhill (its three main oil refineries are now functioning at half-capacity and processing only half the number of barrels of oil as before the invasion, while the biggest refinery in Baiji sometimes operates at as little as 7.5% of capacity); government gas subsidies severely cut (at the urging of the International Monetary Fund); malnutrition on the rise and, according to that Pentagon report to Congress, 25.9% of Iraqi children are stunted in their growth.
In other words, economically speaking, Iraq has essentially been deconstructed.
Diving into Iraq
On December 9, 2001, Vice President Cheney began publicly arguing on Meet the Press that there were Iraqi connections to the 9/11 attacks. It was "pretty well confirmed," he told Tim Russert, that Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker, had met the previous April in Prague with a "senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service." On September 8, 2002, he returned to the program and reaffirmed this supposed fact even more strongly. ("[Atta] did apparently travel to Prague on a number of occasions. And on at least one occasion, we have reporting that places him in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center.") All of this -- and there was much more of it from Cheney, the President, and other top officials, always leaving Iraq and 9/11, or Saddam and al-Qaeda, or Saddam and Zarqawi in the same rhetorical neighborhood with the final linking usually left to the listener -- was quite literally so much Bushwa.
These were claims debunked within the intelligence community and elsewhere before, during, and after the invasion of Iraq. We learned only the other day from a belated partial report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that U.S. intelligence analysts were strongly disputing the alleged links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda while senior Bush administration officials were publicly asserting those links to justify invading Iraq. We learned as well that our intelligence people knew Saddam Hussein had actually tried to capture Zarqawi and that the claim that Zarqawi and he were somehow in cahoots was utterly repudiated last fall by the CIA. None of this stopped the Vice President or President -- who as late as this August 21 insisted that Saddam "had relations with Zarqawi" -- from continuing to make such implicit or explicit linkages even as they also backtracked from the claims.
As is often the case, under such lies and manipulations lurks a deeper truth. In this case, let's call it the truth of wish fulfillment. The link between 9/11 and Iraq is unfortunately all too real. The Bush administration made it so in the heat of the post-9/11 shock.
Think of that link this way: In the immediate wake of 9/11, our President and Vice President hijacked our country, using the low-tech rhetorical equivalents of box cutters and mace; then, with most passengers on board and not quite enough of the spirit of United Flight 93 to spare, after a brief Afghan overflight, they crashed the plane of state directly into Iraq, causing the equivalent of a Katrina that never ends and turning that country -- from Basra in the south to the border of Kurdistan -- into the global equivalent of Ground Zero.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The Last Days of Publishing, a novel, and in the fall, Mission Unaccomplished (Nation Books), the first collection of Tomdispatch interviews.
Copyright 2006 Tom Engelhardt | | | | Fokke | | Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 7:51 am Post subject: |
| At the end of 1945 the USA Congress investigated Pearl Harbour.
The committee investigating consisted of six democrats and four republicans.
The result was three different reports, one by seven members, mostly democrats, one by one member who did sign the majority report but whose conclusions almost wholly opposed the report he nevertheless signed, and a report by two republicans that blamed FDR and his cronies for deliberately provoking Japan to attack.
Former Secretary of State Cordell Hull testified 'that the USA tried to manoevre Japan into firing the first shot'.
Charles A. Beard, ‘President Roosevelt and the coming of the war 1941, A study in appearances and realities’, New Haven, 1948
Around 1900 international morals dictated that war was immoral, so democracies could not go to war if they wanted to.
They had to manoevre the country they wanted to fight into firing the first shot.
How Britain provoked Germany into firing the first shot in 1914:
E.D.Morel, ‘Truth & The War’, 1916, London
How Britain provoked Hitler to attack Poland:
Simon Newman, ´March 1939, The British guarantee to Poland, A study in the continuity of British Foreign Policy’, 1976, Oxford.
Pearl Harbour was necessary for Franklin Roosevelt because he had promised the USA people not to go to war unless attacked.
Hitler refused to be provoked in the Atlantic, despite all USA efforts, the USA Navy actively tried to destroy German ships.
So FDR's solution was to provoke the war with Germany thorugh the back door.
Bush's problem was that there was no longer any enemy that could be provoked after the collapse of the USSR in 1990.
Therefore Bush himself had to attack the USA, and the majority of the world fell for the trick.
Though most of the world still believes in the sept 11 kamikazes hardly anyone in the world still believes that the USA attacked Iraq and Afghanistan to bring democracy.
What Bush accomplished is to make the USA the pariah of the world.
When the USA agression machinery NATO celebrated that it existed for 60 years between 10.000 and 30.000 demonstrators went to Strassbourg.
When Obama visited Ankara thousands demonstrated against him.
As De Gaulle long ago said to the Americans 'you think you can solve any problem with force'.
Despite the depression caused by swindle in the USA itself the 'defence' budget has been increased with four percent.
How peaceful it is in Iraq is demonstrated by Obama's visit to Baghdad, he arrived as a thief in the night. | | | | Philadelphian | | Posted: Sat Apr 18, 2009 2:58 pm Post subject: |
| Former Italian President Says 9/11 Solved
American Free Press – December 24, 2007
Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, has told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad, and that this was common knowledge among global intelligence agencies. In what translates awkwardly into English, Cossiga told the newspaper Corriere della Sera:
“All the [intelligence services] of America and Europe…know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the Mossad, with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part … in Iraq [and] Afghanistan.”
Cossiga was elected president of the Italian Senate in July 1983 before winning a landslide election to become president of the country in 1985, and he remained until 1992.
Cossiga’s tendency to be outspoken upset the Italian political establishment, and he was forced to resign after revealing the existence of, and his part in setting up, Operation Gladio. This was a rogue intelligence network under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and ’80s. Gladio’s specialty was to carry out what they termed “false flag” operations—terror attacks that were blamed on their domestic and geopolitical opposition.
In March 2001, Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated, in sworn testimony, “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force … the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”
Cossiga first expressed his doubts about 9-11 in 2001, and is quoted by 9-11 researcherWebster Tarpley saying “The mastermind of the attack must have been a sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel. I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and
flight security personnel.”
Coming from a widely respected former head of state, Cossiga’s assertion that the 9-11 attacks were an inside job and that this is common knowledge among global intelligence agencies is illuminating. It is one more eye-opening confirmation that has not been mentioned by America’s propaganda machine in print or on TV. Nevertheless, because of his experience and status in the world, Cossiga cannot be discounted as a crackpot.
www.americanfreepress.net/html/9-11_solved118.html | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
