| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 7:55 am Post subject: DOWNING STREET MEMO HEARING: US WENT TO WAR FOR ISRAEL |
| Video Special: Downing Street Memo Teach-In | Part I: The Case Against
Bush
http://www.truthout.org/multimedia.htm
t r u t h o u t was in Los Angeles where Congresswoman Maxine Waters
led a teach-in that included actor and activist Mike Farrell, Reverend
Jim Lawson and Fernando Suarez Del Solar. We will be posting video clips
from the event throughout the week.
Overflow Crowds Mark Anniversary of Downing Street Memo
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/072405A.shtml
Hundreds of people were turned away yesterday as capacity crowds packed public forums in US cities to discuss the Downing Street Memo and related evidence that President Bush lied about the reasons for war.
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From: "Stephen Sniegoski" <hectorpv@comcast.net>
To: "Sniegoski, Stephen" <hectorpv@comcast.net>
Subject: Raimondo--Downing St. and Israel
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 22:16:00 -0400
Friends,
Raimondo--Downing St. and Israel
Another excellent piece by Raimondo. As he points out the establishment represented by Milbank and the Washington Post want to dismiss the Downing St. Memo and the other recently-leaked secret British documents, as if it is unimportant that the US want to war for a lie. Of course, if the US went to war for a lie, the obvious question is: why did the US attack Iraq?
When it comes to the reason for the war, even the anti-war folk--Barney Frank and even John Conyers--want to make sure that there is no mention of Israel, which was brought up at the anti-war hearing by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern in response to a question by Congressman Jim Moran (who has gotten in trouble on this issue in the past).
Israel's role is not unknown to Washington politicos. But every politico also knows that mentioning anything negative about Israel--and especially imputing any power to Israel's American supporters--is the lethal third rail in American politics.
So the question is: can one really deal with the WMD war lie without also dealing with the truth? As Raimondo puts it: "Israel's role as one of the chief agitators behind the drive to war is not really in dispute: the neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby (or do I repeat myself?) were certainly pushing for war with Iraq long before 9/11." But can we ever speak the truth in America?
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=6371
June 20, 2005
The Great Awakening
to the Iraq Deception
"Go back to sleep," say Dana Milbank and Barney Frank
by Justin Raimondo
The Downing Streetmemos have created such a stir that even Congress is rubbing its eyes and awakening from its long slumber to ask questions about the Iraq war: a hearing [video link] convened by antiwar Democrats, chaired by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), has created quite a lot of buzz, generating headlines – and howls of outrage from all the usualsuspects, as well as from the Washington Post's Dana Milbank and – surprise, surprise! – Howard "The Scream" Dean. Milbank snarks:
"In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe. They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official."
It is "make believe" to act as if government officials can be held accountable by the people, or even some of their elected representatives. If it isn't "official," it isn't real.
Milbank's condescending tone speaks volumes about the arrogance of the Washington Establishment, a hauteur that permeates the Imperial City like the heavy scent of incense burning on the altar of Empire. It is, as Milbank's piece confirms, bipartisan in nature. For example, the other day I called Rep. Nancy Pelosi's office and asked for a copy of Pelosi's amendment to the military spending bill that would require the president to issue a report card, of sorts, on our "strategy for success" in Iraq. The woman I spoke to immediately adopted an imperious tone and informed me that "the public" doesn't get to see these things until after they're introduced and debated. The bipartisan Washington worldview draws a sharp line of demarcation between the rulers and the ruled. And when this snippy little intern informed me that, no, it was impossible, you could hear the triumph in her voice, as if to assert that even she, a lowly apparatchik, didn't have to kowtow to "the public." (The upshot of that incident: when I insisted, she switched me to Pelosi's press office, where a brusque male assured me he'd be e-mailing the text of the amendment shortly. It never arrived.)
The same imperiousness permeates Milbank's piece, which is shot through with words like "playmates," and phrases such as "dress-up game," but mixed in with the pink froth is a small, albeit potentially lethal, dose of poison:
"The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration 'neocons' so 'the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world.' He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
"'Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation,' McGovern said. 'The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic.' Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who prompted the question by wondering whether the true war motive was Iraq's threat to Israel, thanked McGovern for his 'candid answer.'
"At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations – that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an 'insider trading scam' on 9/11 – that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks."
Thanks to the Internet and the miracle of streaming video, we don't have to depend on "reporters" of the Milbankian persuasion anymore to tell us what McGovern said: we can go see and hear for ourselves. So click on this link, go to about an hour and forty minutes into the hearing, and listen for yourself. There was nothing the least bit "awkward" in what McGovern said. Rep. Jim Moran asked him a perfectly reasonable question – if it wasn't about WMD, or links to al-Qaeda, then why did we go to war with Iraq?
McGovern, a former CIA analyst, came up with a perfectly reasonable answer: the "OIL" syndrome, or Oil, Israel, and the Logistical "base" that figures prominently in neoconservative [.pdf file] politico-military strategy for the "liberation" of the Middle East. The oil factor is not even debatable, and surely American military preeminence in the region, as well as the refusal of the U.S. to forswear any effort to build permanent bases in Iraq, lends credence to the "logistical" part of the equation. As for the role played by Israel and its American amen corner in ginning up this war, McGovern didn't quote Goebbels, he cited Brent Scowcroft, who famously said of Bush:
"Sharon just has him wrapped around his little finger. I think the president is mesmerized. When there is a suicide attack [followed by a reprisal] Sharon calls the president and says, 'I'm on the front line of terrorism,' and the president says, 'Yes, you are…' He [Sharon] has been nothing but trouble."
Surely Milbank recalls these remarks, since they were reported in his paper: but I guess he just forgot about it, just like he forgot to mention McGovern's reference to Scowcroft. An even lower blow, however, is the reference to leafleting that might have been the work of anyone exceptthe groups organizing the hearing.
This sort of juxtaposition is a shoddy rhetorical device, utilized to discredit anyone who challenges the conventional wisdom: to even mention this kind of tinfoil hattery in the same breath as the subject of the hearings, and McGovern's remarks, is a cheap intellectual package deal. Israel's role as one of the chief agitators behind the drive to war is not really in dispute: the neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby (or do I repeat myself?) were certainly pushing for war with Iraq long before 9/11, and this was noted not only by Pat Buchanan but also by Michael Kinsley, intelligence expert James Bamford, and retired General Anthony Zinni. Are all these people anti-Semites? Before a single shot had even been fired, Prime Minister Sharon was already nominating Syria and Iran as the next candidates up for "regime change," albeit not too loudly. Should we pretend not to know this?
Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor and Publisher, takes offense at Milbank's superciliousness in the face of so muchhuman suffering brought on by this war and wonders how a hearing exposing the fantasy "intelligence" conjured by this administration could itself be characterized as "make believe." In the Bizarro World moral universe of Washington, D.C., where war is peace and freedom is slavery, joviality is the response to 1,700-plus deaths and 40,000 wounded in the service of a lie.
Worse than Milbank, however, is Howard Dean, whose reputation for over-the-top remarks is only enhanced by his reaction to Milbank's smear:
"We disavow the anti-Semitic literature, and the Democratic National Committee stands in absolute disagreement with and condemns the allegations."
What allegations? Who distributed the literature? There are no answers to these questions, apparently, at least none that are forthcoming. If he really thinks Republicans are the root of all evil, does he believe they would be above planting such leaflets as an attempt at disruption. The remarkably incurious Dean – who has recently characterized Republicans as "pretty much a white Christian party," and as people who "never worked a day in their lives" – continued his hyperbolic streak by having this to say about Ray McGovern's remarks at the hearing:
"As for any inferences that the United States went to war so Israel could 'dominate' the Middle East or that Israel was in any way behind the horrific September 11th attacks on America, let me say unequivocally that such statements are nothing but vile, anti-Semitic rhetoric."
I don't recall anybody at the hearing saying that Israel was behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks: not that Dean ever let facts get in the way of his emotional outbursts, which are mostly calculated attempts at demagoguery that invariably fail. McGovern, it should be noted, was merely citing Brent Scowcroft: is Dean saying that, aside from being "white Christians" who "never worked a day in their lives," Republicans in the Scowcroft mold are also neo-Nazis?
It looks like Dean's tenure as DNC chairman is going to be one long Dean scream – or maybe not that long, on second thought. He's alienated the moderates, who don't like the tone of his attacks on Republicans, and now he's turning off his antiwar base, which mistakenly believes he's some kind of a maverick. Is it too much to hope that he'll soon be put out to pasture? It may be only a rumor that the Republicans are paying his salary, but if so he's certainly earned a raise.
Rep. Conyers had his own response to the Milbank smear, and while a bit more spirited, focused, and accurate than Dean's, nonetheless exhibited the same political cowardice when it came to Ray McGovern's remarks:
"To give such emphasis to 100 seconds of a 3 hour and five minute hearing that included the powerful and sad testimony (hardly mentioned by Milbank) of a woman who lost her son in the Iraq war and now feels lied to as a result of the Downing Street Minutes, is incredibly misleading."
Conyers furthermore describes McGovern's comments as "making an anti-Semitic assertion" – a grave accusation and a totally inaccurate statement, one that the congressman doesn't even believe. If he does believe it, how come he didn't point that out in the remaining hour and 20 minutes of the hearing? Instead, he just sat there and nodded agreement.
Yes, the Israeli lobby is powerful, and Conyers has every reason to fear it; but show a little courage, congressman: Mrs. Sheehan and all the other mothers who have lost sons and daughters in this seemingly inexplicable war deserve answers. They need to know why and how their beloved progeny were sacrificed on the altar of the war god. To collaborate in the smear of those who are giving honest answers does them – and all of us – a great disservice.
The awakening of the American public, triggered by the Downing Street memos, is just the beginning of an educational process that is going to take us in precisely the direction that Chairman Dean and Rep. Conyers most fear. Now that the American people have woken up to the fact that they were lied into war, they naturally want to know: by whom? Who are the liars, and how did they manage to disguise their lies as "intelligence"?
The closer we get to the real answer, the louder and more hysterical the War Party becomes: charges of "anti-Semitism" cloud the issue, and that's the whole point. As Americans begin to understand who was feeding the government false information about Iraqi WMD and Saddam's nonexistent links to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and what their real motive was, both Dean and Conyers may begin to understand the dangers of defining "anti-Semitism" quite so broadly.
Israel is a nation, and as such it pursues its own unique national interests. In spite of Israeli propaganda that defines its objectives as synonymous with America's, the recent rift in relations is hard to miss, and, in any case, the underlying disparity of interests is merely coming to the surface. The U.S. and Israel have been drifting apart since the end of the Cold War, and Ray McGovern's denial that the U.S. and Israel are really allies is based on certain unpleasant facts that Milbank can verify simply by reading his own newspaper.
There is a very good reason why Israel conducts covert operations in the U.S. – up to and including espionage. Israel's survival depends on American financial, political, and military support. The symbiosis of the "special relationship" demands that the Israelis keep up a constant effort to influence U.S. foreign policy, and who could blame them if they launched an all-out effort to rope us into war with Iraq – and now Syria and Iran? As the Israelis push into Kurdistan and use that nominal province of Iraq as a base to launch operations against Damascus and Tehran – both rule restive Kurdish minorities – it is difficult to deny that Tel Aviv is well on its way to dominating the Middle East. An acknowledgment of rising Israeli power, far from being "anti-Semitic," is a tribute to the strength of the world's only Jewish nation, its entry into the great power pantheon.
The question is: does this really serve American interests? It would seem Israel is the great exception to the hegemonist doctrine authored by Paul Wolfowitz, which avers that the U.S. must seek to prevent any other nation from achieving a position where they might challenge American dominance in any region of the world. However, the decline of neoconservative influence in this administration, due in part to the disastrous course of the war, may signal that this policy of putting Israel first is imperiled if not ended.
It is only natural for Israel's American lobby to protest that opposition to this rather odd policy is "anti-Semitic." After all, we live in a political culture where everyone hides behind their ethnic identity to claim special status as a victim. An entire class of Official Victims has been elevated, by law and now by custom, into an affirmative action aristocracy. As part of a privileged class, they don't have to answer for their foibles or excesses: it's all excused because, after all, they've suffered. They have the right to be unreasonable, to act out their "oppression," and even to indulge in a little oppression of their own. If you object, you're a "racist," you're the living incarnation of Hitler, and now they're even reviving one of their favoriteepithets with obscure historical references: Coughlinite!
I note in passing that the vocabulary of the neoconservatives is resonant with the rhetoric of the 1930s because most of them are unreconstructed leftists who look back to that time of "national unity" – and a cozy alliance with the Soviet Union – as a kind of Golden Age, when they could simply accuse their political enemies of being in league with Hitler and the Mikado and that was the end of the argument. It was an era of unparalleled state power heralding the rise of a mighty American empire – precisely the goals projected by today's neocons, with their "big government conservatism" and brazen neo-imperialism.
As investigators move in on several pending matters – the Plame affair, the upcoming trial of Larry Franklin and the AIPAC defendants, the inquiry into who fed the U.S. with forged documents allegedly proving that Saddam had procured uranium from the African country of Niger – the education of the American people will proceed apace. Israel's role as the progenitor of this war, as the catalyst whose agents planted phony "evidence" of Iraqi WMD, even as they stole our secrets and passed them on to Tel Aviv, is becoming more apparent by the day. Neither the hysterical fulminations of a has-been presidential contender, nor the equally shrill and unreasonable accusations of "Coughlinism" coming from the neocons, will blunt the sharp question of federal prosecutors as they dig out the truth about a reckless cabal that committed several crimes – including espionage [.pdf file] – as they lured us with lies down the road to war.
I should also address Rep. Barney Frank's objections to what Ray McGovern said on the panel. Barney says:
"The notion that United States foreign policy is somehow being manipulated by Israel is not only gravely mistaken, it is redolent of the sort of conspiracy theories imputing hidden powers to the Jews that have plagued the world for too long."
If that is true, then Israel and its American amen corner should have thought of that before they launched an all-out campaign to bamboozle us into war. Why is the burden of this policy and its horrific consequences placed on its opponents instead of its authors?
Rep. Frank said the question by U.S. Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), "which gave prominence to the role of Israel as one of the possible major factors behind the invasion, and the answer by witness Raymond McGovern, which not only blamed Israel for the war in substantial part, but objected even to Congressman Moran's citing Israel as an American ally, are both refuted by the evidence discussed at the hearing itself."
Frank went on to say that "nothing in the Downing Street memo in any way supports the allegation that the war in Iraq was all an Israeli plot." There is more than one "Downing Street memo," as the congressman is doubtless aware, and in one of them [.pdf file], the British ambassador to the U.S. reports on a lunch with Paul Wolfowitz in which the former deputy secretary of defense and intellectual architect of this war argues that Saddam's atrocities should be emphasized in the propaganda campaign preceding the invasion. "A lot of work" had been done on this during the reign of Bush I, said Wolfowitz. Meyer added: "Wolfowitz thought that this would go a long way to destroying any notion of moral equivalence between Iraq and Israel."
America is preparing to invade the heart of the Middle East, conducting bombing raids and killing Iraqis in massive numbers, and Wolfowitz is worried about the moral opprobrium attached to Israel? If this doesn't reveal Israel-centric tendencies at the highest levels of this administration, then one can only wonder what would.
Frank goes on to say that the war came about "not because of some secret deal with Israel, but because of the foreign policy worldview of those in charge of Bush administration national security – who of course did not include the nominal Secretary of State, Colin Powell." Frank apparently excludes the possibility that an important part of that worldview was – and is – that Israel's interests must be pursued even at America's expense. He points out that the U.S. is now seemingly imposing a solution to the Palestinian problem, ostensibly against Israel's wishes: he doesn't mention that Israel's settlements remain largely intact, and that the "security wall" continues to divide Palestinian communities and encroach on Palestinian land.
"The latest step in the evolution of that policy was a decision by President Bush – over the objections of many in Congress, which I did not share – to provide direct aid to the Palestinian Authority. I believe this was a constructive measure by President Bush in pursuit of an overall peace, and it hardly fits the notion that Israel is the master string-puller of the United States government."
The political fortunes of a manipulative cabal may change, but they did succeed in their mission: we are now in Iraq and not leaving anytime soon. Furthermore, the war seems to be spreading to Syria and perhaps even Iran. Certainly, a lot of activity points in that direction. No one is saying that the neoconservative faction in this administration is "the master sting-puller" in the sense that they hold absolute power in Washington: recent reverses, as Frank underscores, are proof enough of that. However, if they could manage to pull the strings just long enough to get us into a war, that is another matter entirely.
The American people are beginning to wake up, even as myriad voices try to lull them back to sleep. Who lied us into war? Americans want to know. The evidence, as it accumulates, is the final judge, but Frank, Conyers (to some degree), and Dean want to rule out a certain verdict in advance. They won't succeed. All the cries of feigned outrage, the smears, and the forced political correctness won't prevent the American people from finally educating themselves – and their alleged representatives – and taking action. The ongoing spectacle of death in Iraq is generating a social and political backlash that is going to sweep away the hypocrisy and ideological biases that have dominated American politics for too long, including the political correctness that places Israel on a pedestal, as being somehow above criticism – or, at the very least, subject to a different standard.
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
By the way, the story about an Israeli company having a "warning" about 9/11 originated not in the fever swamps of the neo-Nazi movement, but with a respected Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, which ran a story saying that one or more New York employees of Odigo received instant messages about half an hour before the attacks. When I wrote to the reporter, Yuval Dror, expressing my extreme skepticism about this story, he assured me that the president of the company, a reputable businessman, stands behind Ha'aretz's reporting. My opinion: It looks like a planted story, put out there by the Israelis themselves for whatever reason. The "insider trading" story was run by the San Francisco Chronicle and other mainstream newspapers and later discounted, but what that has to do with Israel is not at all apparent, at least to me.
–Justin Raimondo
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http://democracyforamerica.com/memo_movie.php
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washingtonpost.com
Democrats Play House To Rally Against the War
By Dana Milbank
Friday, June 17, 2005; A06
In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe.
They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.
Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman." He liked that so much that he started calling himself "the chairman" and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as "unanimous consent" and "without objection so ordered." The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along.
The session was a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied to the nation and was guilty of high crimes -- and that a British memo on "fixed" intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun equivalent to the Watergate tapes. Conyers was having so much fun that he ignored aides' entreaties to end the session.
"At the next hearing," he told his colleagues, "we could use a little subpoena power." That brought the house down.
As Conyers and his hearty band of playmates know, subpoena power and other perks of a real committee are but a fantasy unless Democrats can regain the majority in the House. But that's only one of the obstacles they're up against as they try to convince America that the "Downing Street Memo" is important.
A search of the congressional record yesterday found that of the 535 members of Congress, only one -- Conyers -- had mentioned the memo on the floor of either chamber. House Democratic leaders did not join in Conyers's session, and Senate Democrats, who have the power to hold such events in real committee rooms, have not troubled themselves.
The hearing was only nominally about the Downing Street Memo and its assertion that in the summer of 2002 Bush was already determined to go to war and was making the intelligence fit his case. Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador whose wife was outed as a CIA operative, barely mentioned the memo in his opening statement. Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq, said the memo "only confirms what I already suspected."
No matter: The lawmakers and the witnesses saw this as a chance to rally against the war. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) proclaimed it "one of the biggest scandals in the history of this country." Conyers said the memos "establish a prima facie case of going to war under false pretenses." Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) concluded that "the time has come to get out" of Iraq.
The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration "neocons" so "the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world." He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
"Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation," McGovern said. "The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic."
Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who prompted the question by wondering whether the true war motive was Iraq's threat to Israel, thanked McGovern for his "candid answer."
At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations -- that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an "insider trading scam" on 9/11 -- that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks.
The event organizer, Democrats.com, distributed stickers saying "Bush lied/100,000 people died." One man's T-shirt proclaimed, "Whether you like Bush or not, he's still an incompetent liar," while a large poster of Uncle Sam announced: "Got kids? I want yours for cannon fodder."
Conyers's firm hand on the gavel could not prevent something of a free-for-all; at one point, a former State Department worker rose from the audience to propose criminal charges against Bush officials. Early in the hearing, somebody accidentally turned off the lights; later, a witness knocked down a flag. Matters were even worse at Democratic headquarters, where the C-SPAN feed ended after just an hour, causing the activists to groan and one to shout "Conspiracy!"
The glitches and the antiwar theatrics proved something of a distraction from the message the organizers aimed to deliver: that for the Bush White House, as lawyer John C. Bonifaz put it, the British memo is "the equivalent to the revelation that there was a taping system in the Nixon White House."
Of course, Democrats controlled the real committees back then -- though Conyers was not deterred. "We have a lot of work to do as a result of this first panel," he told his colleagues. " 'Tis the beginning of our work."
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http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/showstory.php?pn_sid=295
Ray McGovern to Dana Milbank
You used to get your facts straight, at least. It appears that in your new assignment meticulousness is not a requirement. Even your "search of the congressional record" concerning mention of the Downing Street Minutes came up short. Do you not consider Sen. Harry Reid a member of Congress?
It troubles me that you should find it "awkward" that I mentioned Israel and its interests as perceived by the "neocons" as a motivating factor in the Bush administration's decision to launch an unprovoked war on Iraq. That, Dana, is a no-brainer. Let me suggest you simply familiarize yourself with the documents of the "neocon" Project for a New American Century.
I did not say that "Israel should not be considered an ally." I think the transcript will show that I simply noted the fact that Israel is not an ally of the United States. It is a point of fact. And I, for one, object not only to the president's repeated references to such an "alliance," but to his behaving as though there were one. Is it possible that he actually believes there is one? If so, I doubt that any in his shrinking circle of advisers would take the risk of disabusing him of that notion, particularly if his father's national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, is correct in saying that our current president has been "mesmerized" by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
I am among the first to defend Israel's right to exist within secure and internationally recognized borders, and to deplore our nation's slowness in recognizing and doing something to stop the Holocaust. (And I deplore violence of all kinds—whether against Israel, or initiated by it.) But, unless I am mistaken, an alliance requires a treaty ratified by the Senate. Have I missed something?
What is saddest of all is your willingness to be enlisted in the cabal against Rep. James Moran (D-VA). The record will show that Moran's question to the panel did NOT, as you write, include "wondering whether the true motive [for the attack on Iraq] was Iraq's threat to Israel." The thought was all mine, and I stand by it.
What does merit the word "awkward" is that I have to write you this note. I used to look forward to reading your column. Until now, I had thought that your professional standards—like those of an intelligence analyst—ruled out the kind of slant reflected in your column today.
Were I not to have admired your past record, I might even think you are campaigning for a Gold Star from your editors, since your inaccurate, tendentious report dovetails so well with their torturous effort to play down the implications of the Downing Street Minutes. Those minutes are, indeed, a smoking gun. You'll see.
Yours truly,
Ray McGovern
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Congressman James Moran/Ray McGovern:
Mr. Moran:
What I would like to do is to get back to why we did do it. We understand that the reasons we were given were part of an endemic pattern of deceit, they were not the real reasons. What do you think was the real reason?
It has been suggested theat the oil companies were concerned, Saddam was giving contracts to Russian and France and maybe that‘s what it was. We wanted to get control over the oil. It has been suggested that rather than being the president of a failed economy, which was the situation in 2003, that being commander and chief of a mighty military was a lot better political position to be in. There was the suggestion that while Iraq was no threat to the United States, Iraq could have been a threat to our ally in the Middle East.
What was the real motivation in your mind for why we did go to war?
Mr. McGovern:
All of the above. I use the acronym O.I.L. O for oil. I for Israel. And L for the logistical base deemed necessary by the so-called neocons – and it reeks through all their documents – the logistical military base whereby the United States and Israel could dominate that area of the world. It’s a very strategically important area of the world, mostly because it has oil, but also because Israe, which is traditionally described as our “ally” - and I don’t know of any alliance we have with Israel - has been very influential in our policy. Witness the fact that the first President Bush’s national security advisor [Brent] Scocroft has described the president as being mesmerized by Ariel Sharon who has the president wrapped around his finger. OK?
So what I’m saying here is oil was a major factor. Israel was another factor. And I have to say that Israel is something that is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation. The last I did this the previous director of Central Intelligence called me “anti-Semitic.”
And the other thing is the ideological strategic vision of the so-called neocons. You can see it in their documents: “We are the sole remaining superpower in the world. We would be remiss in our duty were we not to use this power in every strategically important part of the world. And what’s more important than the Middle East.” That would be my answer.
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Subject: Is it possible to wipe the sneer off your face
To: Milbankd@washpost.com
Your article "Democrats Play House to Rally Against the War" is another example of what has happened to the Washington Post, a newspaper that used to be revered. Do you think it's funny that the Democrats were put into a basement room and denied the use of a venue for their hearing? Do you find it amusing that Cindy Sheehan lost her son in Iraq? And that Joe Wilson's wife lost her job, because the Bush administration wanted him to lie about the yellow cake in Niger, and he wouldn't?
You chose, instead, to sneer at Conyers, the 122 representatives, and the 560,000 of us citizens who have signed a document to force Bush and the neo-cons to tell the truth about invading Iraq.
The session did not take any kind of awkward turn when Ray McGovern talked about going to war for Israel. In 2002, Sharon bragged, "I want to tell you something very clear: Don't worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
Finally, to suggest that the hearing was not about the Downing Street Memo is ridiculous. Everything we saw and heard yesterday is a direct result of that memo and the perfidy of this administration.
Greta Berlin
Washington, DC
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Milbankd@washpost.com
Dear Mr. Milbank,
Your article is just another in a series of examples as to why people call reporters, WHITE HOUSE STENOGRAPHERS!
Let me point to the remarks of Paul Wolfowitz to explain why we are in this disastrous quagmire.
From the FIFTH Downing Street Memo:
Meyer added: "Wolfowitz thought that this would go a long way to destroying any notion of moral equivalence between Iraq and Israel."
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-images/upload/meyermemo.pdf
Let me point out something else for your education:
05/04/2003
White man's burden
By Ari Shavit
The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history. Two of them, journalists William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, say it's possible. But another journalist, Thomas Friedman (not part of the group), is skeptical...
Is the Iraq war the great neoconservative war? It's the war the neoconservatives wanted, Friedman says. It's the war the neoconservatives marketed. Those people had an idea to sell when September 11 came, and they sold it. Oh boy, did they sell it. So this is not a war that the masses demanded. This is a war of an elite. Friedman laughs: I could give you the names of 25 people (all of whom are at this moment within a five-block radius of this office) who, if you had exiled them to a desert island a year and a half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=280279
Thank God that we have the foreign press to rely on. You people have become less than worthless and will never be a William Shirer!
Have a nice day!
"By Way Of Deception Thou Shalt Do War"
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Just saw the following linked at www.whatreallyhappened.com :
Dissing Conyers Reveals Truth: Invasion was for Israel
http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/?p=728
Conyers Gives Both Barrels to Milbank, Shoots Himself in the Foot:
http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/?p=733
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Complete timeline of the 2003 Invasion of Iraq: Motives
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_timeline_of_the_2003_invasion_of_iraq&general_topic_areas=motivesBehindWar
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Just saw the following at www.whatreallyhappened.com
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=28991&archive=true
Relatives of some troops killed in Iraq seek hearings on Downing Street memo
By Leo Shane III, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Friday, June 17, 2005
Leo Shane III / S&S
Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., left, speaks to members of Military Families Speak Out about his experience at a soldier’s funeral last month. With him are, from left, Dianne Davis Santorello, Celeste Zappala and Bill Mitchell. All three had a son killed serving in Iraq.
Leo Shane III / S&S
Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., listens to members of Military Families Speak Out.
WASHINGTON — Several parents of soldiers killed in Iraq visited Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ask for congressional hearings on the Downing Street memo, which one mother called President Bush’s “Watergate.”
Critics say the document, which contains minutes from a meeting in July 2002 between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and top aides, shows that Bush was determined to go to war with Iraq and ignored evidence that showed the country had no weapons of mass destruction.
“Military action was now seen as inevitable,” the memo reads. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
The memo was first revealed by the Sunday Times of London in May. Earlier this month, both Bush and Blair dismissed the accusations, saying that the war in Iraq was justified because Saddam Hussein was ignoring international law.
But members of Military Families Speak Out, whose members are relatives of troops killed in Iraq, said Congress must investigate whether the president lied to the country to justify military action.
“This war was based on lies and deception,” said Celeste Zappala of Philadelphia, whose son was killed in April 2004 while providing security for investigators searching for WMD. “The only way we can understand how we’ve come to this disastrous position is to find out what the truth is.”
The group, which has frequently criticized the administration, met with congressmen and left flyers petitioning for a full investigation at the offices of Republican House leaders.
“I envy the parents who support this war, because if I did I’d sleep better,” said Dianne Davis Santorello, a Pennsylvania resident whose son was killed in August 2004. “But I don’t sleep well. My son died for a lie.”
She said the Downing Street memo would “bring down the house of cards” if lawmakers choose to investigate it, and compared it to the Watergate scandal which eventually forced President Richard Nixon from office.
Rep. James McGovern, D-Mass., said if true the allegations in the memo are “shameful” and told the parents, “Those who are responsible should be held accountable.”
“This clearly wasn’t a war of necessity; it was a war of choice,” he said.
The group also petitioned lawmakers to set a specific date for the full withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., and other Republicans who last month supported an unsuccessful measure to mandate an exit date were presented with a certificate of thanks from the group.
Jones, who plans to introduce similar legislation on Thursday, said he was “heartsick” at the families’ loss and pledged to help them in their efforts.
Also on Thursday, Democrats have planned a meeting concerning the memo, to be followed by a rally outside the White House.
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It is hardly ‘anti-Semitic’ to convey the truth that Israelis were in fact warned prior to the 9/11 attack as the following article from an Israeli newspaper (Haaretz) conveys:
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=77744&contrassID=/has%5C
Odigo says workers were warned of attack
By Yuval Dror
Odigo, the instant messaging service, says that two of its workers received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen, and the company has been cooperating with Israeli and American law enforcement, including the FBI, in trying to find the original sender of the message predicting the attack.
Micha Macover, CEO of the company, said the two workers received the messages and immediately after the terror attack informed the company’s management, which immediately contacted the Israeli security services, which brought in the FBI.
“I have no idea why the message was sent to these two workers, who don’t know the sender. It may just have been someone who was joking and turned out they accidentally got it right. And I don’t know if our information was useful in any of the arrests the FBI has made,” said Macover. Odigo is a U.S.-based company whose headquarters are in New York, with offices in Herzliya.
As an instant messaging service, Odigo users are not limited to sending messages only to people on their “buddy” list, as is the case with ICQ, the other well-known Israeli instant messaging application.
Odigo usually zealously protects the privacy of its registered users, said Macover, but in this case the company took the initiative to provide the law enforcement services with the originating Internet Presence address of the message, so the FBI could track down the Internet Service Provider, and the actual sender of the original message.
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Also, check out the article from the ‘Forward’ (a respected Jewish publication out of New York) which mentions that the Israelis detained were Mossad operatives with a specialization in ordinance and surveillance:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/02/16/israeli-spy-rumors-fly-on-gusts-of-truth-with-9-11.php
Check out this article as well (from the Sunday Herald in Scotland):
http://ww1.sundayherald.com/37707
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http://www.ccmep.org/2003_articles/Iraq/120403_former_israeli_intelligence_offi.htm
Former Israeli Intelligence Official Criticizes Israeli Assessments on Iraq
The Associated Press
Thursday, December 4, 2003
JERUSALEM -- A former Israeli intelligence officer charged Thursday that Israeli agencies produced a flawed picture of Iraqi weapons capabilities and substantially contributed to mistakes made in U.S. and British pre-war assessments on Iraq.
The comments of reserve Brig. Gen. Shlomo Brom represented an unusual criticism of the Israeli intelligence community, long regarded as one of the world's best. Prior to his retirement in 1998, Brom served in Israeli military intelligence for 25 years, and acted as the deputy chief of planning for the Israeli army.
Career officers in Israel traditionally maintain close ties with military colleagues even after retirement. Brom's research was conducted under the aegis of Israel's leading strategic affairs think tank, Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center.
Brom said he was directing his remarks at Military Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, and the Mossad intelligence agency.
The army declined to comment. The Mossad did not immediately return a message.
Brom first raised his concerns in a report, "The War in Iraq: An Intelligence Failure?" The article was published this week in "Strategic Assessment," the quarterly bulletin the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, where he works as a researcher.
American and British leaders used the purported existence of the weapons, including chemical and biological agents, as one of the main justifications for going to war with Iraq earlier this year.
Stuart A. Cohen, the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, wrote last month that with all the evidence the U.S. government possessed, "no reasonable person could have ... reached any conclusions or alternative views that were profoundly different from those that we reached."
Cohen was the acting chairman of the council when he oversaw the production of a National Intelligence Estimate summarizing U.S. evidence on Iraq's alleged weapons programs, concluding that Iraq possessed prohibited biological and chemical weapons and missiles and was producing more.
Since ousting Saddam Hussein, the U.S.-led coalition's technical experts have continued a futile search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
"Israeli intelligence was a full partner with the U.S. and Britain in developing a false picture of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction capability," Brom said. "It badly overestimated the Iraqi threat to Israel and reinforced the American and British belief that the weapons existed."
Brom said a lack of professionalism and poor supervision were major reasons for the Israeli intelligence failure.
"Even if Iraq had any Scud missiles left, I can't understand how Israeli intelligence officers came to believe they threatened Israel, particularly when they hadn't been used in more than 10 years," Brom said. "It's a clear example of how an inability to think clearly is undermining the Israeli intelligence community."
Israeli leaders said on the eve of the Iraq war there was an outside chance that Saddam Hussein might arm Scud missiles with chemical or biological agents and attack the country. Partially based on the precedent of the 39 Iraqi Scuds that hit Israel during the 1991 Gulf War, the warning resulted in the expenditure of tens of millions of dollars and disrupted daily life.
Brom also cited the bitter memories of the 1973 Middle East War, when Israeli intelligence failed to anticipate an attack by Egypt and Syria, and the country suffered thousands of casualties.
"Israeli intelligence agencies have tended to overstate the threat the country faces ever since 1973," he said.
Following the publication of Brom's article, opposition lawmaker Yossi Sarid called for a parliamentary inquiry on the performance of Israeli intelligence services.
Sarid told Israel Radio the article proved that Israeli intelligence assessments on Iraq caused Israel considerable damage by compelling it to prepare for "threats that did not exist."
Last edited by Alpha on Sun Jul 24, 2005 10:25 pm; edited 28 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 8:09 am Post subject: |
| The issue in Iraq was not as much for oil as it was for Israel (in accordance with the 'A Clean Break' agenda of the JINSA/CSP/PNAC Neocons as discussed by esteemed US intelligence author James Bamford on pages 261-269/321 of his 'A Pretext for War' book). The oil companies were actually against the war in Iraq as they wanted the sanctions against Saddam lifted (the neocons certainly didn't want that!) as Saddam was willing to sell as much oil as they wanted for bargain prices (see the article which is included at the following URL):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/03/17/secret-u-s-plans-for-iraq-s-oil.php
However, the neocons seemed like they wanted to get at Saddam's oil like their crony Khodorkovsky was doing with Yukos in Russia (I had heard that he had met with JINSA/PNAC Zionist extremist Richard Perle in Israel):
SECRETS US PLANS FOR IRAQ's OIL:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2005/03/17/secret-u-s-plans-for-iraq-s-oil.php
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/16/134133/271
EXCLUSIVE dKOS INTERVIEW WITH Lt. Col. KAREN KWIATKOWSKI
by alysheba
Thu Jun 16th, 2005 at 10:41:33 PDT
"The Downing Street Memo confirms what I witnessed and have been writing about... It all fits, and should lead to a deluge of related documents and witnesses." - Lt. Col Karen Kwiatkowski
Diaries :: alysheba's diary :: :: Trackback ::
As you know, Congressman John Conyers (D-MI) is holding a hearing today to investigate, for the first time at the Congressional level, the now-infamous "Downing Street Minutes." Rep. Conyers is expected to begin connecting the dots, to work backward from the undisputed authenticity of the DSM to paint a fuller picture of exactly how the push to "fix" the case for invading Iraq was carried out here in the United States.
I can think of no one more qualified to address this matter than Lt. Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who blew the whistle on the Pentagon's "Office of Special Plans," a cadre of neoconservative planners, operating off-the-books and outside accepted intelligence channels, whose sole mission was to build the case on Iraq's WMD capability. According to repeated statements by Kwiatkowski, members of the OSP - few, if any, of whom had any background in intelligence gathering or analysis whatsoever - were engaged in a coordinated effort to "cherry-pick" data which happened to support their objective, while ignoring any data that might have undermined the goal of war with Iraq.
To anyone who's read the DSM, this all sounds depressingly familiar.
My intent with this diary - in the event partisans like House Judiciary Chairman, James Sensenbrenner, further torpedo John Conyers' investigation - is to reexamine the Office of Special Plans as a means of adding weight to what we've learned from the Downing Street Minutes. While the DSM may be "the smoking gun," I believe the Office of Special Plans is the silver bullet - the one that tore through our Constitution and put our Democracy in Intensive Care. With the gracious cooperation of a brave Soldier for Truth, I hope to shine some light on a crime whose victims now number into the tens of thousands.
NOTE: This interview was made possible by Kossack, Shockwave, who facilitated all communication between myself and Colonel Kwiatkowski. If his name appears in the comments section, consider giving him a tip. He's a good one to have on our side. Believe me.
INTERVIEW: Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, USAF (Ret.)
Karen Kwiatkowski retired from the Air Force in July of 2003, after 20 years of service. A graduate of the Naval War College, she served as a communications officer both in the field and in acquisition programs, as a speechwriter for the Director of the National Security Agency as well as in the office of the Secretary of Defense's staff covering African affairs. In May of 2002, she was transferred to the Pentagon's Near East / South Asia policy office (NESA) where she worked, ostensibly, for Deputy Undersecretary of Defense, William Luti. It was here in the offices of NESA that she witnessed the cementing of the neoconservative stranglehold on this country's military policymaking, and its means of presenting intelligence to the public.
alysheba: The seeds of the OSP were planted, as I understand it, at the moment Bush took office. Before they'd even been confirmed, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith had begun purging the Pentagon of career analysts who didn't share their views on Iraq, clearing the way for an ideological platform that had been articulated in 1997 with the formation of PNAC. At the time you signed on with the NESA office, who were the major ideological "players" in the office and to what degree did the OSP "exist"?
Karen Kwiatkowski: A lower level ideological player in my staff circle was our boss, Bill Luti. When I arrived in May 2002 into NESA, Luti was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy, Near East South Asia. He was a retired Naval Captain who had been a military aide to Secretary of Defense Cheney a decade or so earlier, and in 2001, he was reassigned to the Pentagon from a short stint on Vice President Cheney's staff in 2001.
By November 2002, Luti had been elevated from Deputy Assistant to Deputy Under Secretary. For 2001 and most of 2002, Luti's immediate supervisor was Assistant Secretary of Defense Peter Rodman, and he was not an ideologue of the neoconservative variety. Rodman appeared to me to be largely inconsequential on many NESA policy issues, inasmuch as a lot of NESA work was conducted between Bill Luti or one of his assistants, such as Abe Shulsky, directly to and from Under Secretary for Policy Doug Feith or higher. Shulsky later headed up the OSP.
Luti had his Ph.D. from Tufts, the Fletcher School of International Relations, and Shulsky had completed advanced study at the University of Chicago. I was told by co-workers that he had studied under Strauss there, but I don't know. Of course, other key higher level ideologues relating to Middle East policy included Doug Feith and his former patron, Richard Perle, now reincarnated as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Certainly, Paul Wolfowitz was a passionate ideologue.
Almost all of the political appointees in NESA and many in other parts of OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) Policy were also narrowly ideologically driven, at least in NESA. Guys like Dave Schenker who had come in from WINEP to work the Israel/Syria/Lebanon desk. Before I got to NESA, David Wurmser had been a political appointee within OSD Policy. Of course, PNAC itself was a significant source of members of the Defense Policy Board. There is a long list of big and not so big neoconservative fish in the tiny tank that was processing and creating Middle East policy within OSD.
OSP existed in several forms before it was disbanded in the fall of 2003. Initially there was the smaller group (a couple of folks) that were assigned by Rumsfeld after 9/11 to reexamine the intelligence to see what had been missed or overlooked by the professional intelligence system. In retrospect, that seems quite presumptuous, but we used to love that about Rumsfeld in the early days. I don't know who these guys were, although I think Abe Shulsky could have been one of them. In any case, Shulsky was the unquestioned leader of the OSP when it had grown to about 18 or so people, and was provided separate spaces from the rest of NESA in August 2002.
We had a NESA staff meeting that August, and Bill Luti announced that the OSP was formed, was moving out of our spaces, and curiously we were told to tell no one that it was called the OSP. Instead, we were to refer to it as the "Expanded Iraq Desk." Several weeks after the OSP folks left our spaces, Larry Franklin (indicted on May 4th for passing secrets to Israel via AIPAC) and another person who was working the Iran desk also moved up to OSP.
Later, perhaps to accommodate Iran, it was sometimes referred to as the Northern Arabian Gulf desk. OSP did Iraq work, and also influenced and overlapped function with other parts of OSD in engaging in terrorism and WMD proliferation work. They produced sets of talking points on demand for the rest of NESA and others in OSD on Iraq, terrorism and MD. We were mandated to use these points verbatim, in their entirety and without modification or supplementation. We were directed by Bill Luti to never use an older set of talking points, but for each paper we wrote for our seniors or others, we were to request the latest set of talking points. Abe Shulsky was the final approving authority on every version of the talking points, and I remember sometimes we had to wait for him to release the current set. They were generally classified SECRET, but of course many of the phrases and points brought out in the talking points were very familiar to all Americans because they were consistently reflected in presidential and vice presidential speeches in the fall and winter of 2002.
a: Anyone whose dismissal was of particular concern to you?
KK: It seems that most of the potential non-team players in Middle East policy had been taken out or replaced before I arrived in NESA. This included the Director of NESA, Joe McMillan, the career (non-political) flag level civilian incumbent who would have served as Bill Luti's second. This position stayed vacant from 2001, and wasn't filled until after we invaded Iraq.
Strangely, NESA was always crying for people, and trying to get them, but it is difficult to find political ideologues who are eligible for such career civil service positions. The Defense Intelligence Agency assigns a senior professional intelligence officer to each of the OSD policy directorates. NESA's DIO at the time, Bruce Hardcastle, was marginalized and complained about by the politically appointed ideologues during the time I was there. Luti was unhappy with his briefings on the WMD danger that Iraq posed to us and others, and pressured the DIO to change those intelligence assessments. Hardcastle, true to his surname perhaps, however, steadfastly exhibited courage and integrity.
Basically, by late 2002, Luti found a different way to present the information he wanted, and ceased utilizing the DIO briefing. I was busy that fall and winter trying to arrange a visit to North Africa where Luti and Mr Hardcastle (the DIO) were both expected to attend. I was informally advised by a co-worker that Luti would not permit the DIO to be in the same room, in effect had refused to work with him in any way. It is very interesting in a policy planning organization at that level to simply refuse to work with, listen to, or be briefed by your top professional intelligence advisor.
It seems petty and childish, but it was typical of how professional civilians and military folks were marginalized and not necessarily fired, but simply removed from access to the decision-makers on Iraq policy and planning.
Another personnel changeout that occurred before I got there was the replacement of the retired military officer, then career civilian who worked the Israel/Syria/Lebanon desk. This individual, by reputation an outstanding action officer with lots of on-the-ground experience, was replaced by political appointee David Schenker from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel thinktank.
I saw no one fired, but I watched as military and civilian professional alike found ways to shorten their tour under Luti and the neo-crazies. I actually was assigned in the office to replace a CIA loan officer who curtailed his 12 month assignment to NESA after only five months. He found a job in Yemen, and was grateful for the opportunity. Military people buckled under and privately called their buddies, working to get out of what is normally a prized OSD level three year tour. Civilians did the same, and those who didn't like the ideology of the new NESA found ways to leave or mentally check out.
a: I'm still trying to understand the geography of the NESA offices. Were you, for example, doing your work on North Africa at one desk while the person at the next desk was working on OSP-specific material? How exactly did the pro-war "groupthink," as you called it in a Common Dreams interview, resonate outward from those working directly for the OSP component of NESA?
KK: Near East South Asia policy covers Bangladesh to Marrakech. During the summer of 2002, it was like that, regular apolitical desk officers were sitting next to folks who were assigned or who had come in to work Iraq policy for Abe Shulsky and Bill Luti. These future OSP guys for the most part had no exposure to policy or the Pentagon except from college or thinktanks, and it was not clear what they were doing in any case. They weren't doing desk officer work, and that was obvious to the rest of us. Once they were removed to their own spaces, we quickly forgot about them.
There were two military officers in OSP, both Air Force pilots taking an OSD staff tour. These two would be expected to have been apolitical. One was, and he was the key guy who seemed to interface with the rest of the staff officers, and was a really hard worker. The other Colonel was a former congressional staff aide to Newt Gingrich, now on the Defense Policy Board, and he was obviously political and seemed very much a true believer in the neoconservative cause and planning for Iraq. Neither of these guys were intelligence or political military affairs officers, nor were they regional experts.
a: Is the apolitical colonel Kevin Jones? And the ideologue - the former Gingrich advisor - Col. William Bruner, the man you had been told was "Chalabi's handler?"
KK: Yes on both of them.
In a sense, the selection of people for OSP was designed for pro-war groupthink. Most came to OSP predisposed as true believers that Iraq was to be forcefully converted to a country we controlled, and many of those believers felt that way because their Israeli law partners, family members, friends, advisors and counterparts all felt that way. Richard Perle, Dough Feith and David Wurmser had drafted the 1996 proposal "A Clean Break: A Strategy for Securing the Realm" in support of Netanyahu's political campaign, and it had called for the replacement of Saddam Hussein for Israeli security interests. The apolitical persons in OSP (if there were any at all) who might have countered the groupthink had no background or knowledge of Iraq, intelligence and the proper uses thereof, and I think perhaps some of them were awestruck to be so close to the decision makers and the Vice President's office.
a: Given the coziness between Bruner/Luti and Chalabi, did any of the now-debunked intel to have come from "Curveball" make its way through the OSP? When Curveball's claims (mobile weapons lab / unmanned chem-warfare aircraft / etc.) were debunked in the national media, or perhaps even when you witnessed Colin Powell regurgitating them in front of the UN, did you recognize any of them as "talking points" which had emanated from the OSP?
KK: I don't know for sure, but it seems as if Curveball's bad info did come to the OSP, and may have been disseminated by it. I think that Curveball's info (according to the Rockefeller-Roberts report) came directly to the intelligence community at an earlier date, where it was debunked, but it then found its way back into the community through OSP and/or the Vice President's office.
The later "occurrence" of the same kinds of "reports" may have appeared to intelligence analysts as an independent confirmation of something they had previously rejected. I didn't witness this personally, but the things Curveball insisted were true are very similar to the bullets and phrases I was familiar with from OSP talking points, and these things were not found or reflected in mainstream military intelligence I saw.
Interestingly, the famous "Niger yellowcake" story, debunked by Ambassador Joe Wilson but later inexplicably included in the President's 2003 state of the union address, was never included in our OSP provided talking points. I think this speaks to the multifaceted and comprehensive nature of the administration's very effective effort to create a pretext for a war already predetermined.
a: During your time at NESA, did you ever have any contact with British officials who may have been aware of the OSP's operations?
KK: I don't recall any. Our relationship in the Pentagon with the Brits is close, and I am sure the right guys at the British embassy and elsewhere in Washington knew something about what OSP was doing. It was quite an open secret, and many of the military attachés I spoke with from North Africa and from European countries in the course of my work there were well versed through their own sources as to what was happening in OSP. They seemed to know that OSP was critical to the shaping of Iraq policy and responsible for the alarming stupidity of much of what was going on and being said in 2002 and 2003.
The misuse of intelligence to push the pro war agenda concerned many of them, because you see, other countries have intelligence capability too and some of them wondered what the Americans were smoking.
Luti and others from OSP attended a December 2002 meeting in London with Chalabi's people to produce a new Iraq constitution to be used after we toppled the Ba-ath regime.
a: On July 23rd, 2002, Head of Britain's MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove told Tony Blair that there had been "a perceptible shift in attitude" toward invading Iraq, according to the "Downing Street Minutes." Do you believe that information coming out of the OSP during the preceding months contributed to the "shift in attitude" perceived by Dearlove?
KK: On July 23rd, 2002, OSP had not formally formed or at least been announced, although Abe Shulsky and much of his staff was been present in our spaces for several months. What they were producing in the spring and early summer of 2002 is unclear to me. It certainly wasn't being produced for staff officers at my level, we were still using the processed intelligence as usual to prepare our papers. However, this was a time of major Pentagon leaks to the media, most specifically the New York Times and other papers.
Rumsfeld acted as if he was furious, and mandated a major FBI/AF OSI joint investigation regarding the leaks of war planning information on the upcoming invasion of Iraq. Nothing came of that investigation, and no reporter seems to be curious today as to what the investigation results were, and what part of the Pentagon leaked the info.
There were also increased placement of hysterical "news" articles about the threat Iraq posed in terms of WMD, terrorism and subtle hints of a 9/11 role. The New York Times' Judith Miller appears today as a Jayson Blair-wannabe for the national security pages. The American Enterprise Institute, key neoconservative members of the Defense Policy Board and other neoconservative or prowar thinktanks all published profusely during this time frame. Abe Shulsky probably had a hand in it, but I didn't personally witness his role. I did see how he designed and warped intelligence and hearsay and unverifiable fact for us staff officers to use after August 2002. Quite a creative guy, with little integrity or respect for the truth, at least based on his talking points for our use.
a: One of the recurring themes in the latest series of leaked documents to come out of Britain is the lack of American attention to the issue of postwar planning. Did what you saw coming out of the OSP evince a similar lack of concern for the postwar phase of operations?
KK: One of my final emails to the NESA deputy director, and the one that technically got me moved back to my original OSD Directorate for Sub Saharan Africa, related to my own observations regarding the absence of realistic post war planning.
Everyone wanted to know what they (OSP) were thinking for post-war. The Turkish government had presented our ambassador in Ankara with a long list of post war planning questions. The OSP prepared the answers, and the deputy direct shared this No-Dis Secret message with the rest of us, in hopes that it would answer our general questions.
War with Iraq had been imminent since December if not earlier, so people were wondering about what the aftermath would look like for us, even if they didn't work Iraq issues. One third of the answers to the 40 plus questions were "We're working on that" or "TBD." Another one third were pat answers that showed little competence or forethought. And the rest of the answers were patently insane or unrealistic.
For example, one of the questions from the Turks had to do with human crossflow into and from Iraq after the military victory in Baghdad. Not just refugees but others. Of course, Turkey had some concerns along these lines with Kurdish separatism problems they have. The OSP-drafted answer was that the U.S. Army would secure all of Iraq's borders. I had noted in my email to the deputy director a length comparison between the U.S. border with Mexico and the Iraq border, and suggested in a clearly disrespectful and inappropriate way that the US army was probably not going to be able to secure Iraq's border in any way, shape or form.
Yes, I admit, I had failed the groupthink test and was removed from NESA within the week. But today, it is painfully and tragically obvious that the OSP planning was not just idiotic and inadequate, it was criminal. The only question is whether this was because of incompetence or by design.
a: In your Salon article, you mention Bill Luti's passion for repeatedly forwarding documents to Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Were there other ways in which the Vice President's influence manifested itself within the OSP?
KK: Just an unusual intimacy, in many ways and at many levels. I can only assume that OSP talking points were provided to Cheney's office and his speechwriters, and to Bush's speechwriters. I say this because I had already heard so many of those phrases that the President and Vice President used in the fall and winter of 2002 because I had copied them into my own staff papers, on the authority of Luti and Shulsky.
a: Was there ever a concrete incident in which you were instructed to remove items you knew to be truthful from any material you'd been working on?
KK: In my own case, yes. I was made in late January or early February to change a paper on Libya because I stuck with the intelligence reporting we had, and they wanted it to make Libya out as a bigger evildoer than the intelligence indicated. After three tries the deputy director told me Luti would never accept it this way, and had me email the file to him. He worked it and I don't recall how it ended up.
This had never happened to me in 20 years, and it was because I wouldn't write the "correct" WMD concerns in my paper, because I didn't believe the intelligence supported that "correct" WMD concern. Ironically, after the Iraq invasion, it turned out the our war on terror ally Pakistan had been sending its WMD stuff to Libya, and that certainly wasn't in the intel I had access to. I believe the Pakistan-Libya link came as something of a surprise to the administration. I could have used that to please Bill Luti in early 2003. Darn!
In other words, no one, after August 2002, could write anything directly from the intel sources on Iraq, WMD or terrorism. All written material on those subjects was controlled, created and distributed by Shulsky's OSP. You don't have to change the "facts" when you create them yourself and mandate their unadulterated usage in every paper.
a: By far the most damning statement I've seen attributed to you was a comment you made in your interview with Common Dreams. You said: "The truth is, we know [Saddam] didn't have these things. Almost a billion dollars has been spent - a billion dollars! - by David Kay's group to search for these WMD, a total whitewash effort. They didn't find anything, they didn't expect to find anything."
To date, former UNSCOMM Chief Weapons Inspector, Scott Ritter, is the only person I've seen echo this sentiment publicly, perhaps because it implicitly suggests that the war involved not manipulation, not mistakes, but outright lies. Can you point to anything or anyone else who could help to prove that others actually "knew" Iraq had no WMD?
KK: Tommy Franks and the President must have known, because they sent the bulk of troops into Iraq without chem, bio or nuclear protection gear.
The choice isn't between mistakes and outright lies, it is between being sociopathic mass murderers of American soldiers and Marines or just outright liars. The administration knowingly manipulated what they had in the intelligence and lied about the rest to bring our country, the Congress and the other countries along.
Our intelligence said that Saddam's military capabilities in every category (with the exception of fiberoptic communications and ground survivability strategies against air attacks of the kind we were conducting) was fourth rate and degraded after the 1991 Gulf War, a dozen years of bombing as part of Northern and Southern No Fly Zone enforcement, and sanctions. That intelligence was accurate. Kay had access to it, we all did. Ritter was and remains correct.
a: How did your desire to alert the public to the nature of the OSP first manifest itself? Was it in response to any specific event?
KK: By August 2002, I (and many of my co-workers as well) had seen enough to conclude that these folks were actually lying to pursue an agenda and not just misreading and struggling with on-the-job policy training. I didn't understand why, but when I began to understand the neoconservative ideology through the writings on Irving and Bill Kristol, Perle and Feith, I began to see what was happening.
It was a usurpation of administrative process, and a hijacking of the Pentagon to pursue an narrow and dangerous agenda, that made no security sense for the United States. I sent some of my personal essays, many of them darkly and cynically humorous, to the late Colonel David Hackworth, who published them anonymously on his website Soldiers for the Truth. I also accelerated my planned retirement date.
a: According to Mother Jones, as of February, 2004, no single representative of any of the entities said to be investigating the state of America's prewar intelligence on Iraqi WMD - not the CIA, not Congress, not the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board - has contacted you with a request for testimony. Has anything changed in the last eighteen months? What has been your level of involvement with the Conyers hearing?
KK: The Rockefeller-Roberts commission staffers (not the senators) interviewed me and it was a hostile interview. The Republican staffers wanted evidence that I had personally witnessed (in the same room as) direct threats and intimidation of intelligence officers or others who failed to report or produce party-line - i.e. the pro-war storyline -- in their documents and briefings.
I tried to explain how marginalization of the type I've described previously, replacement of key decision makers with political hacks, incompetents and yes-men, and an intimidating atmosphere aided by the well flaunted relationship of the OSP agenda and Dick Cheney's office constitute an atmosphere of intimidation. They were not interested in that at all.
The funny thing is that if I had been complaining about systematic sexual harassment or prejudicial work environment for a particular class of people - for example, women, persons of color, the foreign born, non-drinking conservative Christians, you name it - the Congress would have been all over it. Instead, I was talking about discrimination and a hostile work environment for truth tellers in the intelligence and policy community and they simply did not care.
Anyway, the Rockefeller-Roberts Commission said they would conduct a Part II investigation of politicization of intelligence after the 2004 elections. Then they quietly cancelled Part II. There are massive amounts of information that Congress has access to that would make an assessment of politicization of intelligence, particularly by the OSP, a massive embarrassment for the Congress as well as the administration.
I was contacted by Conyers' staff for their work on the "Downing Street Memo." I asked if I could send in a short statement, and I did that, and I believe it will be or is already posted on Conyers' website. The "Downing Street Memo" confirms what I witnessed and have been writing about, as well as those better placed in 2001 and 2002 to observe what the top levels (Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith, Cheney and Bush) were thinking. It all fits, and should lead to a deluge of related documents and witnesses.
a: When Harold Rhode, longtime Pentagon specialist on Middle Eastern affairs and one of the chief architects of the OSP, was contacted by Mother Jones for comment on the OSP story, he said: "Those who speak, pay." Since you came forward, there has been a concerted effort to discredit you. Could you describe, in detail, ways in which you have been made to "pay" for daring to speak about the OSP?
KK: Yes, there has been an effort to discredit me. But it has been conducted primarily by the narrowly read and obscenely incestuous family of the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, the National Review Online, and Frontpagemag.com, and a few of their related outlets and sympathizers.
I have been called anti-Semitic, a LaRouchite, an anarchist, and disgruntled. I am none of those things, but I must say, anarchist at least sounds exotic. They rarely challenge my credibility directly, because everything I have personally said or written about what I saw is rock solid accurate. There have been only a few cases where I have been misquoted, and those instances have been jumped on by neocon agitators like a pack of starving dogs on a raw steak.
If I saw something and misunderstood it, you'd think my neoconservative detractors would explain that. But they can't because they know better than I do what was going on, and they apparently don't want to go there. I take a perverse pleasure in being attacked by the chickenhawks who planned and supported this war, while making 100% sure they wouldn't be serving in it, nor their children.
a: If you had an opportunity to address the families of every soldier killed in Iraq, what would you tell them?
KK: Many deaths in many wars are pointless and in the end serve only as unnecessary sacrifices and individual tragedies in vain pursuit of some misguided government policy. Rudyard Kipling said it a hundred years ago, with his Epitaph: "If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied."
That's not very comforting.
My heart goes out to these families, and they have a right to expect accountability and honesty from the President and the Congress. They should insist that the President go ahead and for the very first time, honestly explain why we are in Iraq.
It is about nationally directed economics (not the free market), guaranteed noncompetitive American contracts, puppet governments, Israel's security and Likud Party dreams of leveraging the U.S. military for Israel's own strategic interests, petro-dollar security, and hedging the future China threat - especially if someday we decide not to pay them for all the T-Bills they've been soaking up so we can go play war around the world today. It is about changing our military footprint out of Saudi Arabia into a more central and convenient, operationally cost-effective Iraq. It's about how Bush feels in being a "War President" - a big change from his alcohol-drenched and cocaine-satiated days in the Air National Guard. It's about never having to read an intelligence report that challenges your preconceptions or disrupts your agenda.
K. Kwiatkowski:
http://www.militaryweek.com/kwiatkowski.shtml
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/printme.php?eid=51202
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp_moveon/index1.html
The Office of Special Plans:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030512fa_fact
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,999737,00.html
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp_moveon/index1.html
Documentary Films in Which K.K. Appears:
http://www.hijackingcatastrophe.org/
http://www.truthuncovered.com/
Last edited by Alpha on Wed Jun 22, 2005 4:45 pm; edited 2 times in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 8:21 pm Post subject: Downing Street Memo |
| From: "Stephen Sniegoski" <hectorpv@comcast.net>
To: "Sniegoski, Stephen" <hectorpv@comcast.net>
Subject: Downing Street Memo
Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 10:51:21 -0400
Friends,
Downing Street Memo
The recently revealed British secret documents clearly show that the Bush administration had decided upon war on Iraq by July 2002, and the British government believed it had to go along but sought some cover in order to make the aggressive attack appear legal by the standards of international law. The US, the British were informed, was going to try to provide a legal cover for the war. Richard Dearlove – then director of the Brit equivalent of the CIA – told Blair that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Instead of trying to make an objective assessment of any danger that Iraq posed to the United States, the Bush administration selectively used the most exaggerated intelligence from the most unreliable sources, such as Ahmed Chalabi, in order to gain popular and Congressional support for a war on Iraq. The WMD story was simply a means to achieve a war that had other hidden motives, which apparently would not gain public support nor justify an attack on a country by the standards of international law.
The establishment media--the Washington Post, Michael Kinsley, Dana Milbank, Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC--have dismissed the new British revelations as, in the Post's words, adding nothing new to what "was publicly known in July 2002." The Post claims that "it was argued even then, and has since become conventional wisdom, that Mr. Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration spokesmen exaggerated the threat from Iraq to justify the elimination of its noxious regime." Certainly, if the Post knew that the administration was deceiving the American people about the alleged danger from Iraq, it didn't make much effort to inform its readers. The Post views all this deception in an rather cavalier fashion, as if deception is to be expected in justifying wars; in fact, the Post and the other Establishment folk almost take the position that the war lies were simply a device, perhaps a necessary device, to gain public support for a "good war" against a "noxious" leader; and the Post did, in fact, support the attack on Iraq.
Yes, knowledgeable people should have discerned that the Bush administration WMD claims were false--that even if Saddam had some type of poison gas, as he had in the 1980s, he posed no threat to the US--but the great majority of the people needed to have this drilled into their minds in order to counteract the pro-war drumbeat from the Bush administration and its followers. The mainstream media not only failed to emphasize the Bush administration falsehoods but usually parroted the Bush propaganda, which the Establishment folk now claim they knew to be false.
Of course, this elitist concept of America's rulers doing what they deem to be "good" while lying to the American public completely contradicts the current justification of the war as a fight for democracy (though it does reflect the thinking of the neocon's anti-democratic icon Leo Strauss). In short, in order to bring about democracy, it is presumably necessary to act in completely undemocratic ways, undermining the existence of democracy where it already exists. That type of illogic resembles that of Dostoevsky's revolutionary-ideologue character Shigalov in The Possessed who explains with respect to his own plan for a future society: "I have started out with the idea of unrestricted freedom and I have arrived at unrestricted despotism."
As Prather points out in the first article, the Bush administration clearly violated American law in its deceptive justification for the war. And the issue was not simply one of not telling the truth. For if the administration had admitted that the US was not seriously threatened by Iraq, there would have been no justification to launch an attack. Prather points out how such a national emergency was absolutely essential for Bush to legally use the National Guard.
The second article is the Washington Post's editorial dismissing the importance of the recently-revealed British documents--the nothing-new spin.
http://www.antiwar.com/prather/?articleid=6351
June 18, 2005
The Damning Downing Street Memo
by Gordon Prather
No thanks to the domestic and international neo-crazy media sycophants, you probably now know about the "Downing Street memo."
The memo is actually the minutes – stamped "Secret and Strictly Personal – UK Eyes Only" – of a meeting between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his senior national security team.
The meeting was held at Downing Street on July 23, 2002, and the leaked minutes were first published by the Sunday Times of London on May 1, 2005.
No one in Bush's or Blair's government has questioned the accuracy or validity of what the Sunday Times published.
No one!
Perhaps the most damning revelation is that Richard Dearlove – then director of the Brit equivalent of the CIA – told Blair that "Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Remember that these are minutes of a meeting, not an actual transcript. And much of the meeting concerned Bush's plans and decisions. So Bush and Blair have discounted the Downing Street memo, claiming that most of those plans and decisions were never implemented.
Consequently, the neo-crazy media sycophants are claiming the reason they didn't tell you about the Downing Street memo is that "there is nothing in it that we didn't know about at the time."
Well, maybe they already knew in July of 2002 that Bush-Cheney-Bolton-Wolfowitz-Feith had been "fixing" the intelligence for almost a year to fit the upcoming war of aggression. But did you?
For example, did you know that Bush-Cheney-Bolton had conspired in early 2002 to get Jose Bustani, director-general of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), fired? Why did Bustani "have to go"? According to unnamed Bolton aides, because "he was trying to send [OPCW] chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad and that might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war."
As a result of the revelations contained in the Downing Street memo, constitutional lawyer John Bonifaz has established AfterDowningStreet.org and called for a "Resolution of Inquiry"; a formal congressional investigation into whether President Bush committed impeachable offenses in the run-up to – and launching of – Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Of course, once the inquiry is under way, it need not concern itself with the undisputed revelations contained in the Downing Street memo.
For example, since the war began in March 2003, at least 163 members of the National Guard – plus 45 Army Reservists and 45 Marine Reservists – have died in Iraq.
Until the president or Congress declares a national emergency, the president has no authority over National Guard units or the Guardsmen themselves.
Governors do, but not the president.
On Sept. 14, 2001, President Bush did issue a "Declaration of National Emergency by Reason of Certain Terrorist Attacks" on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and "the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States."
On the same day, citing that declaration, Bush issued an executive order "Ordering the Ready Reserve of the Armed Forces to Active Duty." But, that executive order – citing that declaration – makes no mention of the National Guard or the Reserves.
Bush has, nevertheless, misused that declaration and executive order to justify the federalization of the National Guard and the dispatch of National Guard and Reserve units to fight in Iraq.
By law, the constitutional powers of the president to "introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities" are limited, and can only be exercised "pursuant to (a) a declaration of war, (b) specific statutory authorization, or (c) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces."
On March 19, 2003, in invoking the authority of the "Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of U.S. Armed Forces Against Iraq," President Bush sent his "determination" that Iraq posed "a continuing threat to the national security of the United States" by "continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations."
But isn't that exactly what Richard Dearlove told Tony Blair on July, 23, 2002 that Bush had decided to do, and had been "fixing" the intelligence to that end?
And don't we now know that Bush did send members of our U.S. armed forces – including National Guardsmen and Reservists – to their deaths in Iraq on the basis of "fixed" intelligence?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/14/AR2005061401383_pf.html
washingtonpost.com
Iraq, Then and Now
Washington Post
Wednesday, June 15, 2005; A24
AFTER LAGGING for months, debate on Iraq in Washington is picking up again. That's a needed and welcome development, but much of the discussion is being diverted to the wrong subject. War opponents have been trumpeting several British government memos from July 2002, which describe the Bush administration's preparations for invasion, as revelatory of President Bush's deceptions about Iraq. Bloggers have demanded to know why "the mainstream media" have not paid more attention to them. Though we can't speak for The Post's news department, the answer appears obvious: The memos add not a single fact to what was previously known about the administration's prewar deliberations. Not only that: They add nothing to what was publicly known in July 2002.
Three summers ago the pages of this and other newspapers were filled with reports about military planning for war to remove Saddam Hussein and Mr. Bush's determination to force a showdown. "Debate over whether the United States should go to war against Iraq," we stated in a lead editorial on Aug. 4, "has lurched into a higher gear." Concern that the Bush administration was not adequately prepared for a postwar occupation -- another supposed revelation of the British memos -- prompted widely reported public hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee starting on July 31, 2002.
One observation in the memos is vague but intriguing: A British official is quoted as saying that the "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Yet it was argued even then, and has since become conventional wisdom, that Mr. Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration spokesmen exaggerated the threat from Iraq to justify the elimination of its noxious regime. And the memos provide no information that would alter the conclusions of multiple independent investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, which were that U.S. and British intelligence agencies genuinely believed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that they were not led to that judgment by the Bush administration.
Debate over whether the war should have been fought is appropriate and no doubt will continue for many years. But it ought not distract from what should be an urgent discussion of the present situation in Iraq. After a lull following January's elections, violence -- and U.S. casualties -- have returned to the level of last fall; the political process is stuck on the inability of Shiite and Sunni leaders to reach an accommodation, even as the time allotted to completing a constitution slips away. Recent in-depth reports by The Post and the New York Times have suggested that training of the new Iraqi army continues to yield mixed results and that it will be several more years, at least, before Iraqi units can take the place of U.S. troops.
All this should call into question the Bush administration's present rhetoric and apparent strategy, which assumes that the Iraqi insurgency is, as Mr. Cheney put it, in its "last throes"; that Iraqi units will be ready before the U.S. military, now facing a recruiting crisis, is broken by the strain of deploying more than 130,000 troops; and that the United States can still afford to take a relatively hands-off approach to the political process, leaving Baghdad without an ambassador for months at a time. In fact, the U.S. mission in Iraq seems to be drifting dangerously -- and the president, once again, is not talking frankly to the country about the sacrifice that may be required, or where the troops and other resources for such an effort will come from. Those ought to be the questions at center stage this summer.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Smoking Signposts to Nowhere
by Tom Engelhardt and Mark Danner
Imagine that the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal had broken out all over the press – no, not in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but in newspapers in Australia or Canada. And that, facing their own terrible record of reportage, of years of being cowed by the Nixon administration, major American papers had decided that this was not a story worthy of being covered. Imagine that, initially, they dismissed the revelatory documents and information that came out of the heart of administration policy-making; then almost willfully misread them, insisting that evidence of Pentagon planning for escalation in Vietnam or of Nixon administration planning to destroy its opponents was at best ambiguous or even nonexistent; finally, when they found that the documents wouldn't go away, they acknowledged them more formally with a tired ho-hum, a knowing nod on editorial pages or in news stories. Actually, they claimed, these documents didn't add up to much because they had run stories just like this back then themselves. Yawn.
This is, of course, something like the crude pattern that coverage in the American press has followed on the Downing Street memo, then memos. As of late last week, four of our five major papers (the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and USA Today) hadn't even commented on them in their editorial pages. In my hometown paper, the New York Times, complete lack of interest was followed last Monday by a page 11 David Sanger piece (Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made) that focused on the second of the Downing Street memos, a briefing paper for Tony Blair's "inner circle," and began: "A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made ‘no political decisions' to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced."
Compare that to the front-page lead written a day earlier by Michael Smith of the British Sunday Times, who revealed the existence of the document and has been the Woodstein of England on this issue (Ministers were told of need for Gulf war "excuse"):
"Ministers were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal. The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier."
The headlines the two papers chose more or less tell it all. It's hard to believe that they are even reporting on the same document. Sanger was obviously capable of reading Smith's piece and yet his report makes no mention of the April meeting of the two leaders in Crawford explicitly noted in the memo and offers a completely tendentious reading of those supposedly unmade "political decisions." Read the document yourself. It's clear, when the Brits write, for instance, "[L]ittle thought has been given [in Washington] to creating the political conditions for military action," that they are talking about tactics, about how to move the rest of the world toward an already agreed-upon war. After all, though it's seldom commented on, this document was entitled, "Cabinet Office paper: Conditions for military action," and along with the previously released memo was essentially a war-planning document. Both, for instance, discuss the American need for British bases in Cyprus and on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. It was, as well, focused on the creation of "an information campaign" and suggested that "[t]ime will be required to prepare public opinion in the UK that it is necessary to take military action against Saddam Hussein."
We are talking here about creating the right political preconditions for moving populations toward a war, quite a different matter from not having decided on the war. To write as if this piece reflected a situation in which no "political decisions" had been made (taking that phrase out of all context), without even a single caveat, a single mention of any alternative possible explanation, was bizarre, to say the least.
A day later, the New York Times weighed in with another piece. Written by Todd Purdum and this time carefully labeled "news analysis," it was placed on page 10 and arrived practically exhausted. "But the memos," wrote the world-weary Purdum, "are not the Dead Sea Scrolls. There has been ample evidence for many months, and even years, that top Bush administration figures saw war as inevitable by the summer of 2002."
The Times editors at least had the decency to hide both their pieces deep inside the paper (and the paper remained editorially silent on the subject of the memos). The Washington Post did them one better. On its editorial page, its writers made Purdum look like the soul of cautious reason by publishing Iraq, Then and Now, which had the following dismissal of the memos:
War opponents have been trumpeting several British government memos from July 2002, which describe the Bush administration's preparations for invasion, as revelatory of President Bush's deceptions about Iraq. Bloggers have demanded to know why "the mainstream media" have not paid more attention to them. Though we can't speak for The Post's news department, the answer appears obvious: The memos add not a single fact to what was previously known about the administration's prewar deliberations. Not only that: They add nothing to what was publicly known in July 2002.
Of course, the editorial writers might at least have pointed out that, before March 2003, the Post editorial page, now so eager to tell us that we knew it all then, was generally beating the drums for war. If they knew it all then, they evidently couldn't have cared less that the administration's "prewar deliberations" bore remarkably little relationship to its prewar statements and claims. Nor did they bother to repeat another boringly obvious point – that the best of the Post's reporting on the subject of the administration's prewar deliberations from journalists like Walter Pincus had, in those prewar days, generally been consigned to the inside pages of the paper, while the administration's bogus claims about Iraq (which, they now imply, they knew perfectly well were bogus) were regularly front-paged.
Let's just add that if Post editorialists and Times journalists can't tell the difference between scattered, generally anonymously sourced, pre-war reports that told us of early Bush administration preparations for war and actual documents on the same subject emerging from the highest reaches of the British government, from the highest intelligence figure in that government who had just met with some of the highest figures in the U.S. government, and was immediately reporting back to what, in essence, was a "war cabinet" – well, what can you say? To return to the Pentagon Papers and Watergate affairs, long before news on the Papers was broken in 1971 by the Times, you could certainly have pieced together – as many did – much about the nature of American war planning in Vietnam, just as long before the Watergate affair became recognizably itself (only months after the 1972 election), you could have read the lonely Woodstein pieces in the Post (and scattered pieces elsewhere) and had a reasonable sense of where the Nixon administration was going. But material from the horse's mouth, so to speak, directly from Pentagon documents or from Deep Throat himself, that was a very different matter, as is true with the Downing Street memos.
Let Sunday Times reporter Michael Smith – by his own admission, a British conservative and a supporter of the invasion of Iraq – explain this, as he did in a recent on-line chat at the Washington Post website, with a bluntness inconceivable for an American reporter considering the subject:
"It is one thing for the New York Times or The Washington Post to say that we were being told that the intelligence was being fixed by sources inside the CIA or Pentagon or the NSC and quite another to have documentary confirmation in the form of the minutes of a key meeting with the Prime Minister's office. Think of it this way, all the key players were there. This was the equivalent of an NSC [National Security Council] meeting, with the President, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, George Tenet, and Tommy Franks all there. They say the evidence against Saddam Hussein is thin, the Brits think regime change is illegal under international law so we are going to have to go to the U.N. to get an ultimatum, not as a way of averting war but as an excuse to make the war legal, and oh by the way we aren't preparing for what happens after and no-one has the faintest idea what Iraq will be like after a war. Not reportable, are you kidding me?"
Similarly, on the line in the initial Downing Street memo that has been much hemmed and hawed about here – "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." – he has this to say:
"There are number of people asking about fixed and its meaning. This is a real joke. I do not know anyone in the UK who took it to mean anything other than fixed as in fixed a race, fixed an election, fixed the intelligence. If you fix something, you make it the way you want it. The intelligence was fixed and as for the reports that said this was one British official. Pleeeaaassee! This was the head of MI6 [the British equivalent of the CIA]. How much authority do you want the man to have? He has just been to Washington, he has just talked to [CIA director] George Tenet. He said the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
But does all of this even qualify as a news story today? For that you need a tad of context, so here in full is the President's response when, at a recent news conference with Tony Blair, he was asked about that facts-being-"fixed" reference in the Downing Street memo:
"PRESIDENT BUSH: Well, I – you know, I read kind of the characterizations of the memo, particularly when they dropped it out in the middle of [Tony Blair's election] race. I'm not sure who "they dropped it out" is, but – I'm not suggesting that you all dropped it out there. (Laughter.) And somebody said, well, you know, we had made up our mind to go to use military force to deal with Saddam. There's nothing farther from the truth.
"My conversation with the Prime Minister was, how could we do this peacefully, what could we do. And this meeting, evidently, that took place in London happened before we even went to the United Nations – or I went to the United Nations. And so it's – look, both us of didn't want to use our military. Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option. The consequences of committing the military are – are very difficult. The hardest things I do as the President is to try to comfort families who've lost a loved one in combat. It's the last option that the President must have – and it's the last option I know my friend had, as well.
"And so we worked hard to see if we could figure out how to do this peacefully, take a – put a united front up to Saddam Hussein, and say, the world speaks, and he ignored the world. Remember, 1441 passed the Security Council unanimously. He made the decision. And the world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power."
So even today, our President gets up and, in response to these memos, denies that he or Tony Blair made a decision to go to war until the last second ("There's nothing farther from the truth."), something our papers are now saying we all knew wasn't so back when. So he lied then, and he lies today on this matter, and somehow this isn't considered a news story because somewhere, sometime, some reporters on some major papers actually published pieces contradicting him before the Downing Street documents themselves were written? The logic is fascinating. It is also shameful.
As ever, to hear this discussed in a blunt fashion, you have to repair to the Internet, where, at Salon, for instance, you can read Juan Cole writing in The Revenge of Baghdad Bob:
"Bush is trying to give the impression that his going to the United Nations showed his administration's good faith in trying to disarm Saddam by peaceful means. It does nothing of the sort. In fact, the memo contains key evidence that the entire U.N. strategy was a ploy, dreamed up by the British, to justify a war that Bush had decided to wage long ago... The docile White House press corps, which until the press conference had never asked the president about the Downing Street memo, predictably neglected to press Bush and Blair on those issues, allowing them to get away with mere obfuscation and meaningless non-answers."
I swear, if the American equivalents of the Downing Street memos were to leak (as they will sooner or later), there would be stories all over the world, while our papers would be saying: No news there; we knew it all along. So how have the various memos defied a mainstream media consensus and over these weeks risen, almost despite themselves, into the news, made their way into Congress, onto television, into consciousness?
Well, for one thing, the political Internet simply wouldn't stop yammering about them. Long before they were discussed in print, they were already up and being analyzed at sites like the War in Context and Antiwar.com. So credit the blogosphere with this one, at least in part. But let's not create too heroic a tale of the Internet's influence to match the now vastly overblown tale of the role of the press in the Watergate affair. Part of the answer also involves a shift in the wind – the wind being, in the case of politics, falling polling figures for the President and Congress. Can't you feel it? The Bush administration seems somehow to be weakening.
The mainstream media can feel it, too, and weakness is irresistible. Before we're done, if we're not careful, we'll have a heroic tale of how the media saved us all from the Bush administration.
Sadly, the overall story of American press coverage of this administration and its Iraqi war has been a sorry one indeed, though there are distinct exceptions, one of which has been the work done by the Knight Ridder news service. Its reporters in Washington – Warren Strobel, John Wolcott, and Jonathan Landay among others – seemed remarkably uncowed by the Bush administration at a time when others were treading lightly indeed. Even now, compare Strobel's recent piece published under the very un-American sounding headline British documents portray determined U.S. march to war with the reporting norm. It begins: "Highly classified documents leaked in Britain appear to provide new evidence that President Bush and his national security team decided to invade Iraq much earlier than they have acknowledged and marched to war without dwelling on the potential perils." As it happens, Knight Ridder doesn't have a flagship paper among the majors that would have highlighted its fine reporting, and so its work was essentially buried.
About a month ago, to accompany a forceful analysis by Mark Danner (posted on May 15 at Tomdispatch), the New York Review of Books would become the first publication in this country to put the initial Downing Street memo in print (a striking act for a "review of books" and an indication of just how our major papers have let us down). Recently, John Wolcott of Knight Ridder wrote Danner a brief response and in the July 14th issue of the Review, Danner, who has been on fire this year, considers what to make of the strange media coverage of the memo in this country and why it is important. Thanks to the kindness of the Review's editors, you can read the exchange here. ~ Tom
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Why the Memo Matters
By Mark Danner
On May 16th, the New York Review of Books put the original Downing Street memo in print in this country for the first time. Mark Danner wrote the accompanying analysis, "The Secret Way to War." In response to that piece, John Walcott of Knight Ridder news service wrote a brief letter and Danner, in answering, has now taken the opportunity to return to the significance of the Downing Street memo and the press coverage of it. This exchange will appear in the July 14th issue of the New York Review of Books, on newsstands June 20th.
To the Editors:
Mark Danner's excellent article on the Bush administration's path to war in Iraq [The Secret Way to War, NYR, June 9] missed a couple of important signposts.
On October 11, 2001, Knight Ridder reported that less than a month after the September 11 attacks senior Pentagon officials who wanted to expand the war against terrorism to Iraq had authorized a trip to Great Britain in September by former CIA director James Woolsey in search of evidence that Saddam Hussein had played a role in the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Then, on February 13, 2002, nearly six months before the Downing Street memo was written, Knight Ridder reported that President Bush had decided to oust Saddam Hussein and had ordered the CIA, the Pentagon, and other agencies to devise a combination of military, diplomatic, and covert steps to achieve that goal. Six days later, former Senator Bob Graham of Florida reports in his book, he was astounded when General Tommy Franks told him during a visit to the US Central Command in Tampa that the administration was shifting resources away from the pursuit of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan to prepare for war in Iraq.
John Walcott
Washington Bureau Chief
Knight Ridder
Mark Danner replies:
John Walcott is proud of his bureau's reporting, and he should be. As my colleague Michael Massing has written in the pages of the New York Review of Books, during the lead-up to the Iraq war Knight Ridder reporters had an enviable and unexampled record of independence and success. But Mr. Walcott's statement that in my article "The Secret Way to War" I "missed a couple of important signposts" brings up an obvious question: Signposts on the way to what? What exactly does the Downing Street memo (which is simply an official account of a British security cabinet meeting in July 2002) and related documents that have since appeared, prove? And why has the American press in large part still resisted acknowledging the story the documents tell?
As I wrote in my article,
"The great value of the discussion recounted in the memo...is to show, for the governments of both countries, a clear hierarchy of decision-making. By July 2002 at the latest, war had been decided on; the question at issue now was how to justify it – how to ‘fix,' as it were, what Blair will later call ‘the political context.' Specifically, though by this point in July the President had decided to go to war, he had not yet decided to go to the United Nations and demand inspectors; indeed, as ‘C' [the chief of MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA] points out, those on the National Security Council – the senior security officials of the U.S. government – ‘had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record.' This would later change, largely as a result of the political concerns of these very people gathered together at 10 Downing Street."
Those "political concerns" centered on the fact that, as British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw points out, "the case [for going to war] was thin" since, as the Attorney General points out, "the desire for regime change [in Iraq] was not a legal base for military action." In order to secure such a legal base, the British officials agree, the allies must contrive to win the approval of the United Nations Security Council, and the Foreign Secretary puts forward a way to do that: "We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors." Prime Minister Tony Blair makes very clear the point of such an ultimatum: "It would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the inspectors."
On February 13, 2002 – five months before this British cabinet meeting, and thirteen months before the war began – the second of the articles Mr. Walcott mentions had appeared, under his and Walter P. Strobel's byline and the stark headline Bush Has Decided to Overthrow Hussein. The article concludes this way:
"Many nations...can be expected to question the legality of the United States unilaterally removing another country's government, no matter how distasteful. But a senior State Department official, while unable to provide the precise legal authority for such a move, said, ‘It's not hard to make the case that Iraq is a threat to international peace and security.'... A diplomatic offensive aimed at generating international support for overthrowing Saddam's regime is likely to precede any attack on Iraq...
"The United States, perhaps with UN backing, is then expected to demand that Saddam readmit inspectors to root out Iraq's chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs... If Baghdad refuses to readmit inspectors or if Saddam prevents them from carrying out their work, as he has in the past, Bush would have a pretext for action."
Thus the stratagem that the British would successfully urge on their American allies by late that summer was already under discussion within the State Department – five months before the Downing Street meeting in July 2002, and more than a year before the war began.
Again, what does all this prove? From the point of view of "the senior State Department official," no doubt, such an admission leaked to a Knight Ridder reporter was an opening public salvo in the bureaucratic struggle that reached a climax that August, when President Bush finally accepted the argument of his secretary of state, and his British allies, and went "the United Nations route." Just in the way that unnoticed but prophetic intelligence concealed in a wealth of "chatter" is outlined brightly by future events, this leak now seems like a clear prophetic disclosure about what was to come, having been confirmed by what did in fact happen. But the Downing Street memo makes clear that at the time the "senior State Department official" spoke to the Knight Ridder reporters the strategy had not yet been decided. The memo, moreover, is not an anonymous statement to reporters but a record of what Britain's highest security officials actually said. It tells us much about how the decision was made, and shows decisively that, as I wrote in my article, "the idea of UN inspectors was introduced not as a means to avoid war, as President Bush repeatedly assured Americans, but as a means to make war possible."
The Knight Ridder pieces bring up a larger issue. It is a source of some irony that one of the obstacles to gaining recognition for the Downing Street memo in the American press has been the largely unspoken notion among reporters and editors that the story the memo tells is "nothing new." I say irony because we see in this an odd and familiar narrative from our current world of "frozen scandal" – so-called scandals, that is, in which we have revelation but not a true investigation or punishment: scandals we are forced to live with. A story is told the first time but hardly acknowledged (as with the Knight Ridder piece), largely because the broader story the government is telling drowns it out. When the story is later confirmed by official documents, in this case the Downing Street memorandum, the documents are largely dismissed because they contain "nothing new."
Part of this comes down to the question of what, in our current political and journalistic world, constitutes a "fact." How do we actually prove the truth of a story, such as the rather obvious one that, as the Knight Ridder headline had it, "Bush has decided to overthrow Hussein" many months before the war and the congressional resolution authorizing it, despite the President's protestations that "no decision had been made"? How would one prove the truth of the story that fully eight months before the invasion of Iraq, as the head of British intelligence reports to his prime minister and his cabinet colleagues upon his return from Washington in July 2002, "the facts and the intelligence were being fixed around the policy"? Michael Kinsley, in a recent article largely dismissing the Downing Street memo, remarks about this sentence:
"Of course, if ‘intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,' rather than vice versa, that is pretty good evidence of Bush's intentions, as well as a scandal in its own right. And we know now that was true and a half. Fixing intelligence and facts to fit a desired policy is the Bush II governing style, especially concerning the war in Iraq. But C offered no specifics, or none that made it into the memo. Nor does the memo assert that actual decision makers had told him they were fixing the facts."
Consider for a moment this paragraph, which strikes me as a perfect little poem on our current political and journalistic state. Kinsley accepts as "true and a half" that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" – that is, after all, "the Bush II governing style" – but rejects the notion that the Downing Street memo actually proves this, since, presumably, the head of British intelligence "does [not] assert that actual decision makers had told him they were fixing the facts." Kinsley does not say from whom he thinks the chief of British intelligence, in reporting to his prime minister "on his recent talks in Washington," might have derived that information, if not "actual decision makers." (In fact, as the London Sunday Times reported, among the people he saw was his American counterpart, director of central intelligence George Tenet.) Kinsley does say that if the point, which he accepts as true – indeed, almost blithely dismissing all who might doubt it – could in fact be proved, it would be "pretty good evidence of Bush's intentions, as well as a scandal in its own right."
One might ask what would convince this writer, and many others, of the truth of what, apparently, they already know, and accept, and acknowledge that they know and accept. What could be said to establish "truth" – to "prove it"? Perhaps a true congressional investigation of the way the administration used intelligence before the war – an investigation of the kind that, as I wrote in my article, was promised by the Senate Intelligence Committee, then thoughtfully postponed until after the election – though one might think the question might have had some relevance to Americans in deciding for whom to vote – then finally, and quietly, abandoned. Instead, the Senate committee produced a report that, while powerfully damning on its own terms, explicitly excluded the critical question of how administration officials made use of the intelligence that was supplied them.
Still, Kinsley's column, and the cynical and impotent attitude it represents, suggests that such an investigation, if it occurred, might still not be adequate to make a publicly acceptable fact out of what everyone now knows and accepts. The column bears the perfect headline, "No Smoking Gun," which suggests that failing the discovery of a tape recording in which President Bush is quoted explicitly ordering George Tenet that he should "fix the intelligence and facts around the policy," many will never regard the case as proved – though all the while accepting, of course, and admitting that they accept, that this is indeed what happened. The so-called "rules of objective journalism" dovetail with the disciplined functioning of a one-party government to keep the political debate willfully opaque and stupid.
So: if the excellent Knight Ridder articles by Mr. Walcott and his colleagues do indeed represent "signposts," then signposts on the way to what? American citizens find themselves on a very peculiar road, stumbling blindly through a dark wood. Having had before the war rather clear evidence that the Bush administration had decided to go to war even as it was claiming it was trying to avert war, we are now confronted with an escalating series of "disclosures" proving that the original story, despite the broad unwillingness to accept it, was in fact true.
Many in Congress, including many leading Democrats who voted to give the President the authority to go to war – fearing the political consequences of opposing him – and thus welcomed his soothing arguments that such a vote would enable him to avoid war rather than to undertake it, now find themselves in an especially difficult position, claiming, as Senator John Kerry did during the presidential campaign, that they were "misled" into supporting a war that they believed they were voting to help prevent. This argument is embarrassingly thin but it remains morally incriminating enough to go on confusing and corrupting a nascent public debate on Iraq that is sure to become more difficult and painful.
Whether or not the Downing Street memo could be called a "smoking gun," it has long since become clear that the UN inspections policy that, given time, could in fact have prevented war – by revealing, as it eventually would have, that Saddam had no threatening stockpiles of "weapons of mass destruction" – was used by the administration as a pretext: a means to persuade the country to begin a war that need never have been fought. It was an exceedingly clever pretext, for every action preparing for war could by definition be construed to be an action intended to avert it – as necessary to convince Saddam that war was imminent. According to this rhetorical stratagem, the actions, whether preparing to wage war or seeking to avert it, merge, become indistinguishable. Failing the emergence of a time-stamped recording of President Bush declaring, "I have today decided to go to war with Saddam and all this inspection stuff is rubbish," we are unlikely to recover the kind of "smoking gun" that Kinsley and others seem to demand.
Failing that, the most reliable way to distinguish the true intentions of Bush and his officials is by looking at what they actually did, and the fact is that, despite the protestations of many in the United Nations and throughout the world, they refused to let the inspections run their course. What is more, the arguments of the President and others in his administration retrospectively justifying the war after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – stressing that Saddam would always have been a threat because he could have "reconstituted" his weapons programs – make a mockery of the proposition that the administration would have been willing to leave him in power, even if the inspectors had been allowed sufficient time to prove before the war, as their colleagues did after it, that no weapons existed in Iraq.
We might believe that we are past such matters now. Alas, as Americans go on dying in Iraq and their fellow citizens grow ever more impatient with the war, the story of its beginning, clouded with propaganda and controversy as it is, will become more important, not less. Consider the strong warning put forward in a recently released British Cabinet document dated two days before the Downing Street memo (and eight months before the war), that "the military occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise." On this point, as the British document prophetically observes, "US military plans are virtually silent." So too were America's leaders, and we live with the consequences of that silence. As support for the war collapses, the cost will become clear: for most citizens, 1,700 American dead later – tens of thousands of Iraqi dead later – the war's beginning remains as murky and indistinct as its ending.
This article appears in the July 14th issue of The New York Review of Books.
June 21, 2005
Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] is editor of TomDispatch.com, a project of the Nation Institute. He is the author of several books, including The Last Days of Publishing: A Novel and The End of Victory Culture. Mark Danner, a longtime New Yorker Staff writer and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, is Professor of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley and Henry R. Luce Professor at Bard College. His most recent book is Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, which collects his pieces on torture and Iraq that first appeared in the New York Review of Books. His work can be found at markdanner.com.
Copyright © 2005 Mark Danner
Tom Engelhardt Archives
Find this article at:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt88.html
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British Documents: The Pentagon Papers of Our Time?
The so-called Downing Street memos have been dismissed by some in the press as "old news," but the same could be said of the Pentagon Papers when they were published. As in that case, the shock value of the memos comes from their official nature, and they bring key questions about deceit and poor judgment in the run-up to the Iraq war back for public debate.
By William E. Jackson, Jr.
(June 19, 2005) -- On public radio this week, Walter Pincus, the senior national security reporter for The Washington Post, posed the question: if the statements in the various Downing Street memos are to be dismissed as "old" news--since preparing to go to war in Iraq and questions about intelligence were already "conventional wisdom" and published as such in 2002--then why was so much made of the Pentagon Papers back in the 1970s when reporters knew early on, and were writing, that the Vietnam war was a disaster in which the U.S. had made a string of mistakes?
Ironically, it is the same New York Times which bravely published the Pentagon Papers that, as recently as today, is still treating the Downing Street Papers as merely fodder for “antiwar” types.
Even though their importance has been dismissed, or played down, by both the Bush Administration and several leaders of the mainstream news media in the United States, the British government memos leaked to Michael Smith of the Sunday Times of London do constitute “primary” sources from near the heart of government when composing the first draft of an authoritative history of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
Moreover, all the key questions about the deceit and lack of judgment by the Administration when making the case for war are back on the table for public debate.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/shoptalk_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000963759
Last edited by Alpha on Wed Jun 22, 2005 4:36 pm; edited 3 times in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Jun 18, 2005 8:31 pm Post subject: Memos Show British Concern Over Iraq Plans |
| Memos Show British Concern Over Iraq Plans
By THOMAS WAGNER, Associated Press Writer
17 minutes ago
When Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief foreign policy adviser dined with Condoleezza Rice six months after Sept. 11, the then-U.S. national security adviser didn't want to discuss Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida. She wanted to talk about "regime change" in Iraq, setting the stage for the U.S.-led invasion more than a year later.
President Bush wanted Blair's support, but British officials worried the White House was rushing to war, according to a series of leaked secret Downing Street memos that have renewed questions and debate about Washington's motives for ousting Saddam Hussein.
In one of the memos, British Foreign Office political director Peter Ricketts openly asks whether the Bush administration had a clear and compelling military reason for war.
"U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts says in the memo. "For Iraq, `regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam."
The documents confirm Blair was genuinely concerned about Saddam's alleged weapons of mass destruction, but also indicate he was determined to go to war as America's top ally, even though his government thought a pre-emptive attack may be illegal under international law.
"The truth is that what has changed is not the pace of Saddam Hussein's WMD programs, but our tolerance of them post-11 September," said a typed copy of a March 22, 2002 memo obtained Thursday by The Associated Press and written to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
"But even the best survey of Iraq's WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile or CW/BW (chemical or biological weapons) fronts: the programs are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up."
Details from Rice's dinner conversation also are included in one of the secret memos from 2002, which reveal British concerns about both the invasion and poor postwar planning by the Bush administration, which critics say has allowed the Iraqi insurgency to rage.
The eight memos — all labeled "secret" or "confidential" — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.
Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.
The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.
The eight documents total 36 pages and range from 10-page and eight-page studies on military and legal options in Iraq, to brief memorandums from British officials and the minutes of a private meeting held by Blair and his top advisers.
Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert who teaches at Queen Mary College, University of London, said the documents confirmed what post-invasion investigations have found.
"The documents show what official inquiries in Britain already have, that the case of weapons of mass destruction was based on thin intelligence and was used to inflate the evidence to the level of mendacity," Dodge said. "In going to war with Bush, Blair defended the special relationship between the two countries, like other British leaders have. But he knew he was taking a huge political risk at home. He knew the war's legality was questionable and its unpopularity was never in doubt."
Dodge said the memos also show Blair was aware of the postwar instability that was likely among Iraq's complex mix of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds once Saddam was defeated.
The British documents confirm, as well, that "soon after 9/11 happened, the starting gun was fired for the invasion of Iraq," Dodge said.
Speculation about if and when that would happen ran throughout 2002.
On Jan. 29, Bush called Iraq, Iran and North Korea "an axis of evil." U.S. newspapers began reporting soon afterward that a U.S.-led war with Iraq was possible.
On Oct. 16, the U.S. Congress voted to authorize Bush to go to war against Iraq. On Feb. 5, 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented the Bush administration's case about Iraq's weapons to the U.N. Security Council. On March 19-20, the U.S.-led invasion began.
Bush and Blair both have been criticized at home since their WMD claims about Iraq proved false. But both have been re-elected, defending the conflict for removing a brutal dictator and promoting democracy in Iraq. Both administrations have dismissed the memos as old news.
Details of the memos appeared in papers early last month but the news in Britain quickly turned to the election that returned Blair to power. In the United States, however, details of the memos' contents reignited a firestorm, especially among Democratic critics of Bush.
It was in a March 14, 2002, memo that Blair's chief foreign policy adviser, David Manning, told the prime minister about the dinner he had just had with Rice in Washington.
"We spent a long time at dinner on Iraq," wrote Manning, who's now British ambassador to the United States. Rice is now Bush's secretary of state.
"It is clear that Bush is grateful for your (Blair's) support and has registered that you are getting flak. I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States. And you would not budge either in your insistence that, if we pursued regime change, it must be very carefully done and produce the right result. Failure was not an option."
Manning said, "Condi's enthusiasm for regime change is undimmed." But he also said there were signs of greater awareness of the practical difficulties and political risks.
Blair was to meet with Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, on April 8, and Manning told his boss: "No doubt we need to keep a sense of perspective. But my talks with Condi convinced me that Bush wants to hear your views on Iraq before taking decisions. He also wants your support. He is still smarting from the comments by other European leaders on his Iraq policy."
A July 21 briefing paper given to officials preparing for a July 23 meeting with Blair says officials must "ensure that the benefits of action outweigh the risks."
"In particular we need to be sure that the outcome of the military action would match our objective... A postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point."
The British worried that, "Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden. Further work is required to define more precisely the means by which the desired end state would be created, in particular what form of government might replace Saddam Hussein's regime and the time scale within which it would be possible to identify a successor."
In the March 22 memo from Foreign Office political director Ricketts to Foreign Secretary Straw, Ricketts outlined how to win public and parliamentary support for a war in Britain: "We have to be convincing that: the threat is so serious/imminent that it is worth sending our troops to die for; it is qualitatively different from the threat posed by other proliferators who are closer to achieving nuclear capability (including Iran)."
Blair's government has been criticized for releasing an intelligence dossier on Iraq before the war that warned Saddam could launch chemical or biological weapons on 45 minutes' notice.
On March 25 Straw wrote a memo to Blair, saying he would have a tough time convincing the governing Labour Party that a pre-emptive strike against Iraq was legal under international law.
"If 11 September had not happened, it is doubtful that the U.S. would now be considering military action against Iraq," Straw wrote. "In addition, there has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with OBL (Osama bin Laden) and al-Qaida."
He also questioned stability in a post-Saddam Iraq: "We have also to answer the big question — what will this action achieve? There seems to be a larger hole in this than on anything."
___
On the Net:
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/fcolegal020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/manning020314.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/meyer020318.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ods020308.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/ricketts020322.pdf
http://hosted.ap.org/specials/dowdoc/straw020325.pdf
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1648758,00.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1593607,00.html | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 2:07 am Post subject: Bush an easier target than Israel for Conyers |
| Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 17:37:39 -0700
From: "Jeff Blankfort" <jblankfort@earthlink.net>
To: "John Conyers" <John.Conyers@mail.house.gov>
Subject: Bush an easier target than Israel for Conyers
"In what can only be described as a deliberate effort to discredit the entire hearing, Milbank quotes one of the witnesses as making an anti-semitic assertion and further describes anti-semitic literature that was being handed out in the overflow room for the event. First, let me be clear: I consider myself to be friend and supporter of Israel and there were a number of other staunchly pro-Israel members who were in attendance at the hearing. I do not agree with, support, or condone any comments asserting Israeli control over U.S. policy, and I find any allegation that Israel is trying to dominate the world or had anything to do with the September 11 tragedy disgusting and offensive. " JOHN CONYERS to the Washington Post June 17, 2005
While it is important to recognize John Conyers' efforts to raise the issue of the Downing St. Memo before Congress and the American public, that he had to cast former CIA agent Ray McGovern's accurate description of the war being for OIL (oil, Israel, and location of bases for the US military) as anti-semitic is not only distressing but represents yet another example of who controls the purse strings of the Democratic Party. There was a time when Conyers was a champion of the Palestinian cause, as were other members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and they were taken out or forced to retire one after another thanks to the machinations of the pro-Israel lobby and lack of support from "the left." The lobby obviously don't have to worry about Conyers any more. This is proof that he has learned his lessons well.
The Washington Post article follows Conyers' letter.
Jeff B
Congressman Conyers Hammers the Washington Post
By Congressman John Conyers
t r u t h o u t | Letter
Friday 17 June 2005
Mr. Michael Abramowitz, National Editor;
Mr. Michael Getler, Ombudsman;
Mr. Dana Milbank
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20071
Dear Sirs:
I write to express my profound disappointment with Dana Milbank's June 17 report, "Democrats Play House to Rally Against the War," which purports to describe a Democratic hearing I chaired in the Capitol yesterday. In sum, the piece cherry-picks some facts, manufactures others out of whole cloth, and does a disservice to some 30 members of Congress who persevered under difficult circumstances, not of our own making, to examine a very serious subject: whether the American people were deliberately misled in the lead up to war. The fact that this was the Post's only coverage of this event makes the journalistic shortcomings in this piece even more egregious.
In an inaccurate piece of reporting that typifies the article, Milbank implies that one of the obstacles the Members in the meeting have is that "only one" member has mentioned the Downing Street Minutes on the floor of either the House or Senate. This is not only incorrect but misleading. In fact, just yesterday, the Senate Democratic Leader, Harry Reid, mentioned it on the Senate floor. Senator Boxer talked at some length about it at the recent confirmation hearing for the Ambassador to Iraq. The House Democratic Leader, Nancy Pelosi, recently signed on to my letter, along with 121 other Democrats asking for answers about the memo. This information is not difficult to find either. For example, the Reid speech was the subject of an AP wire service report posted on the Washington Post website with the headline "Democrats Cite Downing Street Memo in Bolton Fight". Other similar mistakes, mischaracterizations and cheap shots are littered throughout the article.
The article begins with an especially mean and nasty tone, claiming that House Democrats "pretended" a small conference was the Judiciary Committee hearing room and deriding the decor of the room. Milbank fails to share with his readers one essential fact: the reason the hearing was held in that room, an important piece of context. Despite the fact that a number of other suitable rooms were available in the Capitol and House office buildings, Republicans declined my request for each and every one of them. Milbank could have written about the perseverance of many of my colleagues in the face of such adverse circumstances, but declined to do so. Milbank also ignores the critical fact picked up by the AP, CNN and other newsletters that at the very moment the hearing was scheduled to begin, the Republican Leadership scheduled an almost unprecedented number of 11 consecutive floor votes, making it next to impossible for most Members to participate in the first hour and one half of the hearing.
In what can only be described as a deliberate effort to discredit the entire hearing, Milbank quotes one of the witnesses as making an anti-semitic assertion and further describes anti-semitic literature that was being handed out in the overflow room for the event. First, let me be clear: I consider myself to be friend and supporter of Israel and there were a number of other staunchly pro-Israel members who were in attendance at the hearing. I do not agree with, support, or condone any comments asserting Israeli control over U.S. policy, and I find any allegation that Israel is trying to dominate the world or had anything to do with the September 11 tragedy disgusting and offensive.
That said, to give such emphasis to 100 seconds of a 3 hour and five minute hearing that included the powerful and sad testimony (hardly mentioned by Milbank) of a woman who lost her son in the Iraq war and now feels lied to as a result of the Downing Street Minutes, is incredibly misleading. Many, many different pamphlets were being passed out at the overflow room, including pamphlets about getting out of the Iraq war and anti-Central American Free Trade Agreement, and it is puzzling why Milbank saw fit to only mention the one he did.
In a typically derisive and uninformed passage, Milbank makes much of other lawmakers calling me "Mr. Chairman" and says I liked it so much that I used "chairmanly phrases." Milbank may not know that I was the Chairman of the House Government Operations Committee from 1988 to 1994. By protocol and tradition in the House, once you have been a Chairman you are always referred to as such. Thus, there was nothing unusual about my being referred to as Mr. Chairman.
To administer his coup-de-grace, Milbank literally makes up another cheap shot that I "was having so much fun that [I] ignored aides' entreaties to end the session." This did not occur. None of my aides offered entreaties to end the session and I have no idea where Milbank gets that information. The hearing certainly ran longer than expected, but that was because so many Members of Congress persevered under very difficult circumstances to attend, and I thought - given that - the least I could do was allow them to say their piece. That is called courtesy, not "fun."
By the way, the "Downing Street Memo" is actually the minutes of a British cabinet meeting. In the meeting, British officials - having just met with their American counterparts - describe their discussions with such counterparts. I mention this because that basic piece of context, a simple description of the memo, is found nowhere in Milbank's article.
The fact that I and my fellow Democrats had to stuff a hearing into a room the size of a large closet to hold a hearing on an important issue shouldn't make us the object of ridicule. In my opinion, the ridicule should be placed in two places: first, at the feet of Republicans who are so afraid to discuss ideas and facts that they try to sabotage our efforts to do so; and second, on Dana Milbank and the Washington Post, who do not feel the need to give serious coverage on a serious hearing about a serious matter - whether more than 1700 Americans have died because of a deliberate lie. Milbank may disagree, but the Post certainly owed its readers some coverage of that viewpoint.
Sincerely,
John Conyers, Jr.
-
The Washington Post
June 17, 2005
Democrats Play House To Rally Against the War
Dana Milbank
In the Capitol basement yesterday, long-suffering House Democrats took a trip to the land of make-believe.
They pretended a small conference room was the Judiciary Committee hearing room, draping white linens over folding tables to make them look like witness tables and bringing in cardboard name tags and extra flags to make the whole thing look official.
Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) banged a large wooden gavel and got the other lawmakers to call him "Mr. Chairman." He liked that so much that he started calling himself "the chairman" and spouted other chairmanly phrases, such as "unanimous consent" and "without objection so ordered." The dress-up game looked realistic enough on C-SPAN, so two dozen more Democrats came downstairs to play along.
The session was a mock impeachment inquiry over the Iraq war. As luck would have it, all four of the witnesses agreed that President Bush lied to the nation and was guilty of high crimes -- and that a British memo on "fixed" intelligence that surfaced last month was the smoking gun equivalent to the Watergate tapes. Conyers was having so much fun that he ignored aides' entreaties to end the session.
"At the next hearing," he told his colleagues, "we could use a little subpoena power." That brought the house down.
As Conyers and his hearty band of playmates know, subpoena power and other perks of a real committee are but a fantasy unless Democrats can regain the majority in the House. But that's only one of the obstacles they're up against as they try to convince America that the "Downing Street Memo" is important.
A search of the congressional record yesterday found that of the 535 members of Congress, only one -- Conyers -- had mentioned the memo on the floor of either chamber. House Democratic leaders did not join in Conyers's session, and Senate Democrats, who have the power to hold such events in real committee rooms, have not troubled themselves.
The hearing was only nominally about the Downing Street Memo and its assertion that in the summer of 2002 Bush was already determined to go to war and was making the intelligence fit his case. Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador whose wife was outed as a CIA operative, barely mentioned the memo in his opening statement. Cindy Sheehan, who lost a son in Iraq, said the memo "only confirms what I already suspected."
No matter: The lawmakers and the witnesses saw this as a chance to rally against the war. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) proclaimed it "one of the biggest scandals in the history of this country." Conyers said the memos "establish a prima facie case of going to war under false pretenses." Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) concluded that "the time has come to get out" of Iraq.
The session took an awkward turn when witness Ray McGovern, a former intelligence analyst, declared that the United States went to war in Iraq for oil, Israel and military bases craved by administration "neocons" so "the United States and Israel could dominate that part of the world." He said that Israel should not be considered an ally and that Bush was doing the bidding of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
"Israel is not allowed to be brought up in polite conversation," McGovern said. "The last time I did this, the previous director of Central Intelligence called me anti-Semitic."
Rep. James P. Moran Jr. (D-Va.), who prompted the question by wondering whether the true war motive was Iraq's threat to Israel, thanked McGovern for his "candid answer."
At Democratic headquarters, where an overflow crowd watched the hearing on television, activists handed out documents repeating two accusations -- that an Israeli company had warning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and that there was an "insider trading scam" on 9/11 -- that previously has been used to suggest Israel was behind the attacks.
The event organizer, Democrats.com, distributed stickers saying "Bush lied/100,000 people died." One man's T-shirt proclaimed, "Whether you like Bush or not, he's still an incompetent liar," while a large poster of Uncle Sam announced: "Got kids? I want yours for cannon fodder."
Conyers's firm hand on the gavel could not prevent something of a free-for-all; at one point, a former State Department worker rose from the audience to propose criminal charges against Bush officials. Early in the hearing, somebody accidentally turned off the lights; later, a witness knocked down a flag. Matters were even worse at Democratic headquarters, where the C-SPAN feed ended after just an hour, causing the activists to groan and one to shout "Conspiracy!"
The glitches and the antiwar theatrics proved something of a distraction from the message the organizers aimed to deliver: that for the Bush White House, as lawyer John C. Bonifaz put it, the British memo is "the equivalent to the revelation that there was a taping system in the Nixon White House."
Of course, Democrats controlled the real committees back then -- though Conyers was not deterred. "We have a lot of work to do as a result of this first panel," he told his colleagues. " 'Tis the beginning of our work." | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 5:30 am Post subject: Fw: "Dean Condemns 'Anti-Semitic Literature'" |
| ----- Original Message -----
From: Kathy and Bill Christison
Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 6:59 PM
Subject: Fw: "Dean Condemns 'Anti-Semitic Literature'"
Kathy and Bill write:
Howard Dean's groveling before Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the
U.S. is one more example of the utter inability of the Democratic
Party's dominant faction to show any honesty, independence, or
willingness to criticize any of Israel's policies or any policies of
the Bush administration supportive of Israel. The evidence is simply
overwhelming that former intelligence analyst Ray McGovern was correct
when he told Conyers and other House Democrats that the war was part
of an effort to allow the United States and Israel to "dominate that
part of the world." That may not have been the only reason for the
war, but it was certainly one significant reason -- far more important
than the pretexts of WMD and spreading democracy. Dean's condemnation
of McGovern's statement is depressing to those of us who entertained
any hope that we might be able one day to vote for a Democratic Party
that stood for honest policymaking and particularly for justice and
human rights around the world.
Ken and Leslie: Would you please distribute this to your lists.
Bill and Kathy Christison
----- Original Message -----
From: Ed Herman
To: hermane@w...
Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 2:02 PM
Subject: FW: "Dean Condemns 'Anti-Semitic Literature'"
Groveling seems now to be built-in to the Democratic Party.
Ed Herman
-----Original Message-----
From: davidepet@c... [mailto:davidepet@c...]
Sent: Saturday, June 18, 2005 12:32 PM
To: davidepet@c...
Subject: RE: "Dean Condemns 'Anti-Semitic Literature'"
( * Get a load of this one.)
Associated Press Online
June 17, 2005 Friday
HEADLINE: Dean Condemns 'Anti-Semitic Literature'
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
A handful of people at Democratic National Headquarters distributed
material critical of Israel during a public forum questioning the Bush
administration's Iraq policy, drawing an angry response and charges of
anti-Semitism from party chairman Howard ! Dean on Friday.
"We disavow the anti-Semitic literature, and the Democratic National
Committee stands in absolute disagreement with and condemns the
allegations," Dean said in a statement posted on the DNC Web site.
Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the House
Judiciary Committee, organized the forum on Thursday at the Capitol to
publicize and discuss the so-called Downing Street memo. That document
suggests that the Bush administration believed that war with Iraq was
inevitable and that the administration was determined to use
intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the ouster
of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
The Sunday Times of London has reported that the prewar document,
which recounts a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair's national
security team, was leaked from inside the British government. The
White House has rejected the memo's assertions.
Conyers' event occurred in a small Capitol meeting room, and an
overflow crowd watched witnesses on television in a conference room at
DNC headquarters. According to Dean, some material distributed within
the DNC conference room implied that Israel was involved in the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
One witness, former intelligence analyst Ray McGovern, told Conyers
and other House Democrats that the war was part of an effort to allow
the United States and Israel to "dominate that part of the world," a
statement Dean also condemned.
"As for any inferences that the United States went to war so Israel
could 'dominate' the Middle East or that Israel was in any way behind
the horrific September 11th at! tacks on America, let me say
unequivocally that such statements are nothing but vile, anti-Semitic
rhetoric," Dean said.
"The inferences are destructive and counterproductive, and have taken
away from the true purpose of the Judiciary Committee members'
meeting," he said. "The entire Democratic Party remains committed to
fighting against such bigotry."
---
--- End forwarded message --- | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 5:45 am Post subject: Re: Fwd: PRIORITY: dean |
| Date: Sat, 18 Jun 2005 21:07:25 -0700
From: "Jeff Blankfort" <jblankfort@earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: Fwd: PRIORITY: dean
...What happened with Dean in 2004 was that he and his manager at the time, Joe Trippi, were being bombarded by his supporters on the internet who were asking why Dean was taking the basic AIPAC line on Israel and Palestine which was, in their eyes, inconsistent with his opposition to the Iraq War. At one point Trippi even denied in an interview that former AIPAC president, Steve Grossman, who was Dean's first campaign hire, was still involved in Dean's campaign, and then when folks emailed him that this wasn't true, Trippi wouldn't respond.
In any event, Dean finally came out with the statement that the US should be even-handed and the first two people to jump all over him were John Kerry and Nancy Pelosi, followed, as I recall, by Uncle Joe Lieberman. What was at work here and what threatened the Democrats was that rather than relying on the usual source for presidential campaign contributions, i.e., wealthy pro-Israel Jews, Dean was getting his money from thousands of supporters on the internet and therefore wasn't beholden to the big Jewish donors. He was soon advised of the lay of the land and what the party required and then he proceeded to backslide and apologize to every Jewish organization he could find. It wasn't just the media that did him in. It was his own party.
Ironically, the Democrats, that claims to be the party of the people, do far less grass roots fundraising than do the Republicans, and rely mainly on two sources for the majority of their contributions, wealthy Jews and pro-Israel PACs and the big labor unions which have been a cornerstone of the lobby from the beginning. Moreover, US labor unions have purchased an estimated half a billion dollars in State of Israel Bonds which obliges them to keep Israel's economy afloat if for nothing else, for the benefit of their pension funds. Now, Dean, as the head of the party knows who holds the purse strings and he won't make the same mistake twice.
Hope this has been of help and really appreciated your comments yesterday.
Jeff Blankfort | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 5:49 am Post subject: Howard Dean’s Anti-Semitism Problem |
| Howard Dean’s Anti-Semitism Problem
http://kurtnimmo.com/blog/?p=735
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Hawkish pro-Israel Democrats" were upset by Dean
"Dean's opposition to the Iraq war and his ambiguous statements about Israel antagonized many in this crowd, especially members of the pro-Israel lobbying powerhouse Aipac."
http://www.forward.com/issues/2004/04.02.06/news6b.campaigncon.html
FEBRUARY 6, 2004
CAMPAIGN CONFIDENTIAL
By E.J. KESSLER
FORWARD STAFF
Jews for Joe!: Confounding the fears of many, including the candidate, Jewish voters in the states that voted February 3 did support Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman in greater percentages than did non-Jews.
In the end, however, that did not provide much help for Lieberman, who ended his centrist bid for the presidency Tuesday.
According to exit polls conducted by the Voter News Service, in Arizona, where Jews comprised 5% of the vote, Lieberman did substantially better among them than he did among voters generally, pulling 23% of the Jews and only 7% of the total vote. Massachusetts Senator John Kerry won the state with 43% of the total vote and also drew 43% of the Jewish vote. In Delaware, where Jews also comprised 5% of the vote, Lieberman drew 29% of the Jewish vote, Kerry 40%. Their percentages of the total vote were 11% and 50%, respectively.
Responding to an oft-heard sentiment among older Jews that his candidacy would stoke anti-Semitism because of Middle East antagonisms, Liebermanore than once exhorted Jews to "stand tall" and step up to the plate and support his effort.
Conceding his defeat Tuesday night, Lieberman turned to the faith that nurtured him throughout his life and political career.
"Dear friends, a campaign ends, but life goes on. I consider myself to be a very lucky man. I have a great family, wonderful friends and an extraordinary opportunity to serve my beloved country as a United States senator," he said. "So tomorrow, when I wake, the first words I will say are the first words I say every morning. I will thank God for blessing me with another day of life, and I will pledge myself in the traditional words to serve the Lord during the day with as much gladness and purpose as I possibly can, to improve the world around me."
* * *
Defunct Dean?: Hawkish pro-Israel Democrats are breathing a sigh of relief that Massachusetts Senator John Kerry has vaulted in front of former Vermont governor Howard Dean in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Dean's opposition to the Iraq war and his ambiguous statements about Israel antagonized many in this crowd, especially members of the pro-Israel lobbying powerhouse Aipac.
"The idea that the Democratic Party was ready to elect someone anti-war was hard to swallow," said one pro-Israel Democrat, speaking on condition of anonymity. "There's definitely a sense of relief."
The Democrat said that Kerry would attract many "institutional Democrats" in the pro-Israel camp, and that his emergence as frontrunner would draw many pro-Israel Democrats who had been dallying with retired general Wesley Clark, as well as many who had been holding back from the race. Even so, the source said, pro-Israel Democrats would be asking penetrating questions to Kerry and others in the field about "the Democrats' ability to deal with the failure of Oslo." These Democrats want candidates to reject the idea that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for unilateral separation, and Israel's security fence, somehow hurt the Palestinians.
Kerry hasn't done that, and has criticized the fence. He also made his own gaffe in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in December, when he suggested that former President Carter and former secretary of state James Baker might make good Middle East envoys. Both men are considered pro-Arab by many pro-Israel activists.
North Carolina Senator John Edwards also stands to gain pro-Israel support. New Jersey lawyer Lionel Kaplan, a former president of Aipac who was a top supporter of Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman, told the Forward, "I believe John Edwards is a good candidate and a good friend of Israel."
Dean's national campaign co-chairman, Steve Grossman, told the Forward that Jewish voters "will hear from Howard Dean in his own voice" positions that will show that he supports a "robust" foreign policy and U.S.-Israel relationship, and that "the New York primary will be the perfect opportunity to do that."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/09/23/dean_israel/
Salon
Howard Dean's Israel problem
When he said the U.S. must be "evenhanded" in the Middle East, rivals and critics accused him of selling out the Jewish state -- even though his position is similar to Bush's and his campaign co-chair used to run AIPAC.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg
Sept. 23, 2003 | Last Saturday, John Kerry gleefully predicted that Democratic rival Howard Dean was "imploding" over Israel. A meme was spreading in the Democratic Party that the former Vermont governor is insufficiently Zionist, that his views represent the antiwar fringe that's said to constitute his base. An Israeli newspaper had predicted that Jewish donors would shun him. Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote him an admonitory letter. Political strategists waxed catastrophic.
What made the uproar so odd is that Dean's Israel policy hardly differs from that of Bush and his main Democratic challengers. His campaign is being co-chaired by Steven Grossman, who from 1992 to 1996 was president of AIPAC, America's most powerful pro-Israel lobby. While Dean vehemently criticizes Bush on a range of issues, when it comes to Israel, he told an audience at Iowa's Drake University in February, "The administration's guiding principles in the Middle East are the right ones. Terrorism against Israel must end. A two-state solution is the only path to eventual peace, but Palestinian territory cannot have the capability of being used as a platform for attacking Israel."
"His position on the Middle East is a right-of-center position," says Juan Cole, a professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. Yet Dean has been cast as the left-of-center candidate, and the self-propelling narrative of the current campaign ensures that nearly everything he says will be interpreted according to that conventional wisdom. And few issues in American politics are as sensitive as Israel, making a mere hint of dissent from the AIPAC line politically hazardous, even for a candidate whose campaign is being run by an AIPAC vet.
Actually, it's unclear how much Dean has strayed from AIPAC orthodoxy. Some of his recent comments about Israel seem aimed at the liberal Democrats fueling his insurgency -- many of whom disagree with his original position. His campaign managers, though, insist the current fracas is simply a result of Dean's extemporaneous remarks being misunderstood and blown out of proportion. Either way, Dean is seen as having deviated from the narrow parameters in which Israel can be discussed in American politics. That threatens to slow his momentum, dampen his fundraising and tarnish his political reputation.
Dean's Israel troubles began at a Sept. 3 campaign event in Santa Fe, N.M. When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said that day, "It's not our place to take sides." Then, on Sept. 9, he told the Washington Post that America should be "evenhanded" in its approach to the region.
The media and the Democratic establishment reacted as if Dean had called Yasser Arafat a man of peace. On Sept. 10, 34 Democratic members of Congress, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, wrote Dean an open letter. "American foreign policy has been -- and must continue to be -- based on unequivocal support for Israel's right to exist and to be free from terror ..." they wrote. "It is unacceptable for the U.S. to be 'evenhanded' on these fundamental issues ... This is not a time to be sending mixed messages; on the contrary, in these difficult times we must reaffirm our unyielding commitment to Israel's survival and raise our voices against all forms of terrorism and incitement."
The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported that Dean had badly damaged his own campaign. "Sources in the Jewish community say that Dean has wrecked his chances of getting significant contributions from Jews ..." the paper wrote. "Many believe Dean's statement will drive more Jews toward Lieberman and Kerry, enabling Kerry to take the lead again."
According to the Dean campaign, the uproar involved semantics, not substance. "Here's what I think happened," says Grossman, Dean's campaign co-chair. "Howard made some comments in someone's backyard in New Mexico that were shorthand, if you will, for some of his Middle East views. In the course of those remarks and some others in the subsequent days, he used some language that gave people consternation, and it was immediately jumped on by Joe Lieberman and John Kerry that somehow Howard Dean was breaking faith with this 55-year tradition of the United States' special relationship with Israel, which is patently absurd."
Cole, though, sees more than simple misstatement in Dean's comments; he interprets Dean's rhetoric as signaling a subtle ideological shift. Last November, Dean told the Jewish newspaper the Forward that his views on Israel mirrored AIPAC's, not the more liberal group Americans for Peace Now, which favors a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians and the dismantling of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. Now, says Cole, "I think that he may have been signaling that he's moving closer to the Americans for Peace Now position, and that is a genuine shift." It's a shift that aligns Dean with the mainstream of American Jewry. As Cole notes, recent polls show that more than 50 percent of American Jews share Americans for Peace Now's views, compared with around a third who share AIPAC's unequivocal support for the Israeli government.
Yet if Dean was moving even slightly to the left on Israel, he quickly backtracked, distancing himself from any damaging suggestion of evenhandedness. The same day the Democrats reprimanded him, Dean appeared on CNN and defended Israel's extrajudicial assassinations of Palestinian militants. "There is a war going on in the Middle East," he said, "and members of Hamas are soldiers in that war, and, therefore, it seems to me, that they are going to be casualties if they are going to make war."
To a casual listener, this might have sounded like an affirmation of support for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's security policies. After all, Israel's targeted killings are widely denounced as violations of the 1949 Geneva conventions, and even the Bush administration has occasionally criticized them.
Yet Dean's opponents quickly seized on his comments as further evidence that he is somehow anti-Israel, professing shock and outrage that Dean had dignified members of Hamas with the word "soldier," instead of calling them terrorists.
On Sept. 12, Kerry issued an indignant press release: "In the wake of Howard Dean's statements last week on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many Democrats wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and dismissed his comments as the flippant remarks of an inexperienced politician. But in going out of his way to term members of Hamas as 'soldiers,' Governor Dean insults the memory of every innocent man, woman, and child killed by these suicidal murderers."
Grossman dismisses Kerry's comments as political opportunism. "Howard basically said these are combatants, they are fighting a war of terrorism, and they should be hunted down and given no quarter," he said. Hardly the position of a stooge for the PLO.
Whatever Dean meant, though, some observers say he hurt himself. Hank Sheinkopf, a longtime Democratic political consultant who worked on the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign, says Kerry's attack was justified and that Dean's comments created an "an extraordinary imbroglio."
Last November, Sheinkopf was quoted in an article in the Forward applauding Dean for naming Grossman to run his campaign. In that article, Dean disavowed Americans for Peace Now, saying, "At one time the Peace Now view was important but now Israel is under enormous pressure. We have to stop terrorism before peace negotiations."
According to Sheinkopf, Dean's recent comments represent an abandonment of that line. "He keeps changing his position," Sheinkopf says. "Now he's calling Hamas soldiers. Either they're terrorists or soldiers. The nomenclature is clear. His language legitimizes terrorists and puts him far out on the left."
If Dean's Israel position really puts him far out on the left, it proves that not showing unequivocal support for the Jewish state remains a political poison pill -- for members of either political party.
Last year, former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney, D-Ga., learned that supporting the Palestinians can be a career-killer when pro-Israel donors poured more than $1 million into the coffers of Denise Majette, who successfully challenged the five-term incumbent in the Democratic primary.
Dean, though, is no McKinney. After all, according to Grossman, the candidate remains in sync with the goals of Bush's Israel policy. Dean's only real criticism of the president is that he hasn't given the region enough sustained attention. "Bush made a huge mistake early on by absenting himself from [the region] for 18 months," Grossman says. "He walked away from the Middle East and acted like the Middle East didn't exist, while the Middle East was exploding in a cauldron of violence. Why? Because Bill Clinton had spent so much time there, and Bush was going to avoid doing anything Bill Clinton had done. Frankly, it was an immature decision. Howard, in contrast, has said, 'I will be involved in this issue from day one because it is critical to the American national interest.'"
In fact, Dean is selling his Israel policy as a continuation of Clinton's, and has called on Bush to send Clinton as an envoy to Israel. In a Sept. 12 letter to the Anti-Defamation League's Foxman, he wrote: "I will follow in the footsteps of Bill Clinton from day one of a Dean Administration and make every effort to bring peace to this troubled region."
That letter, written in response to Foxman's earlier message of concern about Dean's Zionist bona fides, said that, while the United States should play the "honest broker" in Israel's dispute with the Palestinians, it wouldn't try to extract concessions from Israel.
"There is no difference between our positions when it comes to my unequivocal support for Israel's right to exist and to be free from terror," he assured Foxman. "As I have said before, the United States must remain committed to the special, long-standing relationship we have with Israel, including providing the resources necessary to guarantee Israel's long-term defense and security ... I believe, however, that the United States has another important role to play in the region -- that of an honest broker at the negotiating table -- with the trust of both sides and able to facilitate direct talks between the parties ... We are also in agreement that only the Palestinians and the Israelis themselves can make and keep the peace and work out the specifics of a lasting agreement. Peace cannot be imposed by outside parties. On the issue of settlements, both parties have acknowledged that Israel will have to remove a number of settlements. How many and which those are will have to be determined as part of a final agreement negotiated by the parties."
One of Dean's only statements in favor of putting pressure on Israel was issued in support of a Bush administration policy. Last week, the White House announced it was deducting money that Israel spends building West Bank settlements from American loan guarantees -- essentially saying that America won't fund illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. Lieberman and Rep. Dick Gephardt opposed the move, placing themselves to Bush's right, while Kerry and Dean supported it. "Without having read the specific language of the Bush administration's decision, it seems in keeping with my view on conditioning the amount of our loan guarantees," Dean e-mailed the Forward.
No serious candidate took a position to the left of Bush. Indeed, it's precisely because there's no real leftist alternative that Dean's been cast in that role. After all, it's unlikely that Dean's critics ever really thought that he meant to honor members of Hamas when he called them "soldiers," or that, if elected, he'd jettison America's alliance with Israel. But a campaign is always more about images and impressions than carefully formulated positions, and that's where Dean has blundered.
As Sheinkopf says, most voters don't know or care who former AIPAC president Grossman is, or, for that matter, that Dean's wife, Dr. Judy Steinberg Dean, and children are Jewish. "They do know that there are troops in Iraq," he says. "They know Americans have been attacked by terrorists on their own soil and they know that Howard Dean calls terrorists 'soldiers.' It's arrogant to believe people are following every word. What they're following is the nightly news cycle saying Howard Dean is soft on terror."
Yet that nightly news cycle, and the way real issues evanesce in it, might also work in Dean's favor, making potential backers forget all about this interlude. Sheinkopf, for all his criticism of Dean, doesn't think his comments on Israel will affect his fundraising among Jews. "If he appears to be ahead, the money's going to keep coming in from Jews and others. Funders tend to fund winners, not losers." No matter how many gaffes he makes, then, no one can say Dean's imploding till the money dries up.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Michelle Goldberg is a staff writer for Salon based in New York.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dean professes love of Israel, identification with AIPAC, Jewish family, etc., etc. If all this wasn't so harmful, it would be hilarious.
"In a wide-ranging telephone interview with the Forward, Dean, a physician, reflected at length on his "internationalist" foreign policy, his attachment to Judaism through his wife, who is Jewish, and on how having a Jewish family has informed his views on Israel.
"Dean spoke with the Forward shortly after naming Steven Grossman, a former head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and ex-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to a top campaign fundraising post. In addition, Dean said he is traveling to Israel for a week at the end of the month with the American Israel Educational Foundation, AIPAC's educational arm, to meet with Israeli officials and Arab leaders."
http://www.forward.com/issues/2002/02.11.22/news3.html
NOVEMBER 22, 2002
In Prexy Bid, Vt. Gov Taps AIPAC Vet
Married to Jew, Courting Others
By E.J. KESSLER
FORWARD STAFF
Governor Howard Dean of Vermont, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 as a fiscal conservative and social liberal, is making a concerted effort to develop a national Jewish constituency for his candidacy.
In a wide-ranging telephone interview with the Forward, Dean, a physician, reflected at length on his "internationalist" foreign policy, his attachment to Judaism through his wife, who is Jewish, and on how having a Jewish family has informed his views on Israel.
Dean spoke with the Forward shortly after naming Steven Grossman, a former head of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and ex-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, to a top campaign fundraising post. In addition, Dean said he is traveling to Israel for a week at the end of the month with the American Israel Educational Foundation, AIPAC's educational arm, to meet with Israeli officials and Arab leaders.
Dean also discussed his planned appearance at a December 9 fundraising dinner for Americans for Peace Now, where he will present an award to a friend, APN activist Patricia Barr.
Asked if his appearance at the Peace Now event should be read as a signal of his views on the Middle East, Dean said, "No, my view is closer to AIPAC's view." He said he was bestowing the award because the honoree and fellow Vermonter Barr "is a remarkable humanitarian who has served her state and me. I would not turn down an opportunity to honor her."
"At one time the Peace Now view was important but now Israel is under enormous pressure," he continued. "We have to stop terrorism before peace negotiations.... I don't do things for political reasons. I'm very loyal to my friends. Nobody should read anything into my ideology."
Dean's outreach to Jewish supporters comes as the putative candidate, who has been politicking in New Hampshire, Iowa and other primary states for more than a year, is trying to establish national credibility for his dark-horse bid. The only governor presently running in the Democratic field, he represents a small, northeastern state and lacks name recognition. In fact, in a recent Quinnipiac University poll asking respondents to rate the Democratic field, Dean did not even garner enough support to register.
Named governor in 1991 after the sudden death of Governor Richard Snelling, Dean has mapped a centrist course in Vermont, tacking right on issues such as business and taxes but left on social policy. His signal achievement is in expanding health insurance to cover almost every Vermonter, and he has made healthcare policy the centerpiece of his presidential bid.
Dean described his foreign policy views as being "based on cooperation with other nations."
"Unilateralism is a mistake," he said. One of his foreign policy goals "is to bring democracy and freedom to Muslim nations. We can only do that with cooperation. Half of the Muslim world would not support Osama bin Laden if Arab and Muslim regimes were not so oppressive."
Energy independence also ranks a big plank on his foreign policy platform. "The United States has to... take a much harder line on Iran and Saudi Arabia because they're funding terrorism," Dean said. "We need conservation and renewable energy to lessen our dependence on Mideast oil and to have a lever on the funders of terror."
Baptized a Catholic and brought up an Episcopalian, Dean, who described himself as "fairly religious," now practices Congregationalism, a liberal form of Protestantism. The governor, who grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and in the Hamptons as the scion of a wealthy Wall Street family, is married to an internist, Dr. Judith Steinberg, with whom he practiced medicine for 10 years. He credits Steinberg's grandmother, who was born in Russia, with fostering his attachment to the Jewish state.
"I feel close to this family that I was lucky enough to marry into," he told the Forward. "Israel is an important part of what it means to be a Jew. It must never be overrun and eliminated." He added that he has similar feelings about other democracies such as Taiwan. He called his attachment to Israel "visceral."
Dean told the Forward his family is not observant and his son and daughter did not attend Jewish religious school or celebrate a bar or bat mitzvah. The family does observe Chanukah and Passover, however, and enjoys reading the Haggada, he said. Dean then gamely recited a Hebrew blessing.
The family tried the Conservative synagogue in Burlington but the service there contained too much Hebrew, the governor said. More recently, they have gravitated to Burlington's Reform synagogue, Temple Sinai, although he acknowledged that they do not attend often. He said he is attracted to Judaism because, as in Congregationalism, "the temples themselves are responsible first to the congregation and there is no central authority."
James Glazier, the rabbi of Temple Sinai, said he could not gauge whether there was much support for Dean's presidential bid in his congregation, where Dean has spoken occasionally, although many members count Steinberg as their doctor. He said he had delivered an invocation at each of Dean's gubernatorial inaugurations but had not seen Dean in a while because "nobody in Vermont has seen him recently," a reference to Dean's frequent out-of-state campaigning. But he said Dean is "a good guy; he's got a good soul, and he means well.... He's been the 'pediatrician governor,' taking care of issues for children."
"Ask him, will Jim Glazier be doing his [presidential] inauguration? I want to be on that podium," he said. "He's the only Dem out there with a degree of Yidishkayt."
Grossman, the former AIPAC and DNC official, said Dean would appeal to American Jews because Jews, in effect, like doctors: "He is a physician who built a track record on health care... The Jewish community will respond." Grossman said Jews would also approve of Dean's stance in support of civil unions for gay Vermonters because of the Jewish affinity for civil and human rights.
"In order for him to be totally credible to the Jewish community in issues, people will want to see a well-developed foreign policy on Israel and the Middle East and be supportive of Israel's effort to maintain its qualitative edge," Grossman said. "He will have to address this and no doubt will. Based on private conversations I am absolutely confident about where he is ideologically and substantively in bringing him to the American Jewish community."
Grossman said all Americans would relate to Dean because "he's not a career politician. He still sees himself as a citizen." He described Dean, who has a reputation around the Vermont statehouse for being thin-skinned, as "strong, blunt, likeable and decisive."
"No one's going to be elected president if people don't like him," Grossman said, demurring when asked if the remark was a jab at the Democratic frontrunner, former vice president Al Gore.
According to New York political consultant Henry Sheinkopf, Dean's naming of the Massachusetts-based Grossman to his campaign is smart politics, especially if the first primary of 2004, New Hampshire, shapes up as a strongly regional contest featuring Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.
"It gives him more credibility nationally, it gives him more credibility regionally and it assists him in raising money," Sheinkopf said of the move. Dean's best hope is if the primary stays regional in focus, Sheinkopf said; otherwise he has minimal chances of emerging in a Democratic field that includes Gore, Senators John Edwards of North Carolina and Tom Daschle of South Dakota.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interesting tid-bits here. It appears that Dean actually was claiming that Bush was too soft on Israel's enemies besides Iraq--the neocon World War IV scenario.
http://www.alternet.org/story/16280
Dean Not Progressive on Mideast
By Ahmed Nassef, AlterNet
Posted on June 30, 2003, Printed on June 19, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/16280/
Although often portrayed as progressive, former Vermont governor and Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean falls short on several issues important to progressives, with the Middle East being one of the more glaring.
True, Dean is one of the Democratic presidential hopefuls who opposed the invasion of Iraq (along with Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich, conservative Sen. Bob Graham, former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, and Rev. Al Sharpton), but he is closer to a hawk when it comes to Israel/Palestine and U.S. policy toward Iran.
In a major foreign policy speech earlier this year, Dean, while calling for an end to Palestinian violence, did not call for an end to Israeli violence, let alone an end to the illegal Israeli occupation.
And when asked whether his views are closer to the dovish Americans for Peace Now (APN) or the right-wing, Sharon-supporting American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), he stated unequivocally in an interview with the Jewish weekly The Forward, "My view is closer to AIPAC's view."
"At one time the Peace Now view was important, but now Israel is under enormous pressure. We have to stop terrorism before peace negotiations," he said.
Similarly, Dean's official campaign position on solving the Palestinian-Israeli problem is that "terrorism against Israel must end," but there is no mention of the Israeli violence that has resulted in over 2,391 deaths since September 2000.
Last December, Dean told the Jerusalem Post that he unequivocally supported $8 billion in U.S. loan guarantees for Israel. "I believe that by providing Israel with the loan guarantees ... the US will be advancing its own interest," he said. His unconditional support for the loan package, in addition to $4 billion in outright grants, went further than even some of the most pro-Israel elements in the Bush administration, like Paul Wolfowitz, who wanted to at least include some vague restrictions like pushing Israel to curtail new settlements and accept a timetable to establish a Palestinian state.
On the illegal Israeli settlements, Dean seems to be waffling of late. A pro-Dean blog quotes his campaign as calling for the ultimate removal of only "a number of existing settlements." (The link back to the official site was no longer operational as of this writing.) However, in what may signal a softening of his position to woo progressive voters in the just passed MoveOn.org PAC Democratic "primary" vote, Dean called last month for "ultimately dismantling the settlements." So which one is it?
(Dean won the MoveOn vote, but did not secure the 50 percent majority needed to gain the PAC’s support. More rounds of voting will take place.)
In fact, Dean's alignment with AIPAC and their right-wing politics goes much deeper than aligning with the group’s platform. Last year, he named Steven Grossman, a former AIPAC head, as his campaign's chief fundraiser. Soon after, he flew to Israel on an AIPAC-sponsored junket.
And in a telling statement about whether a President Dean would act any differently toward Iran than the Bush neocons, Dean also told The Forward, "The United States has to ... take a much harder line on Iran and Saudi Arabia because they're funding terrorism."
In fact, Dean thinks President Bush is way too soft on Iran. In a March appearance on CBS' “Face the Nation,” Dean explained that "[President Bush] is beholden to the Saudis and the Iranians," something that would certainly come as a surprise to the current regime leaders in Iran who've been labeled as part of an alleged "Axis of Evil" by the current U.S. president. Dean even left open the possibility of preemptive strikes against that country in that interview, adding that "we have to be very, very careful of Iran."
Once again, sounding very much like President Bush, Dean charged during a New Hampshire campaign stop this month that Iran (along with Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Libya) was "funding Palestinian terrorists and fueling terrorism throughout the world."
Apparently, there is another side to this "anti-war" candidate. When combined with his dubious record as governor on issues like welfare "reform" and gun control, it may be prudent for progressives to think twice before casting their vote for Howard Dean.
Ahmed Nassef is editor-in-chief of Muslim WakeUp!, a progressive Muslim online magazine
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Howard Dean Is Nothing But A NeoCon Puppet Like Bush
Tommy Jun 20, 3:34 pm show options
Newsgroups: alt.non.racism, alt.politics, alt.politics.bush, soc.culture.usa, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.education,
From: Tommy <nos...@nospam.com> -
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 15:34:24 -0400
Local: Mon,Jun 20 2005 3:34 pm
Subject: Howard Dean Is Nothing But A NeoCon Puppet Like Bush
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Howard Dean has issued a statement lambasting former CIA intelligence
analyst Ray McGovern for stating the obvious fact that the Iraq War was
orchestrated by Israeli partisans on behalf of Israel rather than the true
interests of the United States.
On June 17, 2005 the Associated Press had an article entitled ?Dean Condemns
Anti-Semitic Statements.? Here are some excerpts:
A handful of people at Democratic National Headquarters distributed material
critical of Israel during a public forum questioning the Bush
administration?s Iraq policy, drawing an angry response and charges of
anti-Semitism from party chairman Howard Dean on Friday.
?We disavow the anti-Semitic literature, and the Democratic National
Committee stands in absolute disagreement with and condemns the
allegations,? Dean said in a statement posted on the DNC Web site?
?As for any inferences that the United States went to war so Israel could
?dominate? the Middle East or that Israel was in any way behind the
horrific September 11th at! tacks on America, let me say
unequivocally that such statements are nothing but vile, anti-Semitic
rhetoric,? Dean said.
Of course, anyone with any knowledge of the origins of the Iraq War knows
that it was cooked up by Neocons who are almost all Jewish extremist
supporters of Israel. The four leading promoters of American going to war
against Iraq were Richard Perle , Paul Wolfowitz , Douglas Feith and David
Wurmser. All four are Jewish supporters of the radical Likud party in
Israel. Perle, Feith and Wurmser wrote a strategic paper for the foreign
government of Israel and Benjiman Netanyahu in 1996 called A ?Clean Break,
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.? Although these men became the
framers of the American Iraq War policy, the paper they wrote was about
securing Israel?s realm by fostering war against Iraq and ultimately Syria
and Iran. The paper suggests that Israel?s way to destroy Damascus (Syria)
is through Baghdad.
The problem they faced was that it would be hard to get Americans to pay the
tremendous price of the Iraq war for Israel. Would Americans be willing to
have thousands killed, tens of thousands maimed, hundreds of billions of
dollars expense and the spawning of worldwide hatred of America for
Israel?s ability to dominate the Mideast? Of course not, so they produced
the lie about ?Weapons of Mass Destruction? and the lie that Baghdad was an
imminent threat to America. Hardly a mention was made of Israel.
The whole process was supported by key Jewish supremacists in different
parts of the American intelligence establishment. For instance the man who
was in charge of the Iraq Intelligence section of the CIA was Stuart Cohen,
a radical Iewish Israeli advocate. Here is quote from ABC when Cohen was
defending his intelligence reports on the Iraq ?weapons of mass
destruction.?
Sunday, November 30, 2003. 12:46pm (AEDT)
CIA admits lack of specifics on Iraqi weapons before invasion
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1000221.htm
The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has acknowledged it ?lacked
specific information? about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction when
it compiled an intelligence estimate last year that served to justify the
US-led invasion of Iraq.
However, an explanation issued over the weekend by veteran CIA analyst
Stuart Cohen, who was in charge of putting together the 2002 intelligence
estimate and currently serves as vice chairman of the National Intelligence
Council, ?
We now even know from an Associated Press Article (thanks to an Israeli
intelligence chief) that Israel itself provided a lot of the bogus data on
Iraq?s supposed weapons of mass destruction.
Associated Press December 4, 2003
Israeli General Derides Findings on Iraq
by Peter Enav - Associated Press Writer
?JERUSALEM ? A former Israeli intelligence officer charged Thursday that
Israeli agencies produced a flawed picture of Iraqi weapons capabilities
and substantially contributed to mistakes made in U.S. and British pre-war
assessments on Iraq.
The comments of reserve Brig. Gen. Shlomo Brom represented an unusual
criticism of the Israeli intelligence community, long regarded as one of
the world?s best. Prior to his retirement in 1998, Brom served in Israeli
military intelligence for 25 years, and acted as the deputy chief of
planning for the Israeli army?
Is it anti-Semitic to point out these facts? Is it anti-Semitic to point out
that the most powerful lobby in the United States Congress (AIPAC) is
actually for a foreign country: Israel! It is right now in the midst a huge
scandal because of its espionage against the United States of America. Is
it anti-Semitic to state that the most powerful lobby in America worked
tirelessly for the war against Iraq.
Not only were the fingerprints of Israel all over the intelligence and
government agencies, they are all over America?s free press. The two most
powerful newspapers in the United States (and both supported the war
wholeheartedly) are the NY Times and the Washington Post. Of course, being
the main newspaper read by almost every member of the U.S. Government in
Washington, DC, the Post has huge influence on politics.
Both papers are thoroughly controlled by Jewish supremacists. In fact, in
replying to the article that attacked Representative Conyers meeting, Mr.
Conyers had to complain to the Chief Editor Mr. Abramowitz and chief
Ombudsman, Mr. Getler. It is this same paper that suggests telling the
truth about Israel is ?anti-Semitism.? It is this same paper that drove
Howard Dean to attack those who told the truth about Israel and the Iraq
War.
And its not just the Post or the Times. Thousands of other newspapers and
most of the media conglomerates are dominated by Jewish radicals. Here?s
quote from one of the leading Jewish newspapers in America on the subject,
the Los Angeles Jewish Times:
more on the below.
http://tinyurl.com/ahdhr
Last edited by Alpha on Mon Jun 20, 2005 9:26 pm; edited 2 times in total | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2005 3:23 pm Post subject: |
| It figures that those 'Israel firster' Jewish Congressmen at the hearing would say this about Ray McGovern who had the courage to say what he did about Israel:
CIA's McGovern Blames Israel for Iraq War (JTA)
CIA's McGovern Blames Israel
JTA Breaking News, 18 Jun 2005 http://www.jta.org/brknews.asp?id=148177
Jewish lawmakers expressed anger at a former CIA analyst who told a U.S. House of Representatives panel that Israel was responsible for the Iraq war. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern told a panel of House Democrats on Thursday that the Iraq war was started so that "the United States and Israel could dominate that area of the world." Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said there was no reason to defame Israel in the discussion. "The witness' statement that the United States
went to war for Israel is absolutely untrue and has no conceivable basis in
reality," Nadler said. "The witness was quite clearly bringing a lamentable
personal bias to bear on an unrelated issue, and I would urge those present at the hearing to disregard the whole of his specious testimony on the subject." Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) also chastised a colleague, Rep. James Moran (D-Va.), who suggested in a question to McGovern that Iraq was not a threat to the United States, but "could have been a threat to our allies." Frank raised concerns about pamphlets handed out at the meeting suggesting Israeli complicity in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Howard Dean, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, called McGovern's comments "destructive and counter-productive."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Media Matters for America" <action@mediamatters.org>
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005 15:08:03 -0400
Subject: ABC asked Rice about Downing Street memo; CNN and Fox passed
ABC asked Rice about Downing Street memo; CNN and Fox passed
http://mediamatters.org/items/200506200001
Of Sunday morning news program hosts who interviewed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on June 19, only ABC's George Stephanopoulos asked Rice about the recently leaked Downing Street memo. The memo contains the recorded minutes of a July 23, 2002, meeting of senior British cabinet officials and advisers and includes British intelligence chief Richard Dearlove's statement, based on meetings with U.S. officials in Washington, that President Bush was determined even then to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq "through military action" and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." Though Chris Wallace, host of Fox Broadcasting Co.'s Fox News Sunday, and CNN Late Edition host Wolf Blitzer also interviewed Rice on Iraq policy that day, neither brought up the memo, which had been the subject of informal hearings on Capitol Hill earlier in the week.
From the June 20 edition of ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos:
STEPHANOPOULOS: As you know, there's also been a lot of talk back here in the United States about these Downing Street memos, the minutes of a meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair in the spring and summer of 2002 where they discussed their meetings with the United States. I want to show you what one mother, Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a U.S. soldier, had to say about that memo this week --
SHEEHAN (video clip): The so-called Downing Street memo, dated 23 July, 2002, only confirms what I already suspected. The leadership of this country rushed us into an illegal invasion of another sovereign country on prefabricated and cherry-picked intelligence.
STEPHANOPOULOS: How do you respond to Mrs. Sheehan?
RICE: Well, I can only say what the president has said many, many times. The United States of America and its coalition decided that it was finally time to deal with the threat of Saddam Hussein. There had been multiple resolutions against Saddam Hussein and his activities -- everything from concerns about his weapons of mass destruction programs and his continued unwillingness to answer the legitimate questions of the international system about those programs, his having used weapons of mass destruction in the past, everything concerning the way that he treated his own people. After all, we found more than 300,000 people in mass graves.
You know, people are talking about, in the U.N. [United Nations] reform, a responsibility to protect [people]. We happen to think that the Security Council is the place that that discussion ought to take place. When you consider what the Iraqi people had gone through in the Saddam Hussein regime's reign, what about the responsibility to the Iraqi people?
We finally undertook an action that got rid of one of the worst dictators in modern times, sitting in the center of the world's most troubled region. And sitting here today in Jerusalem, I can tell you, George, that this region is far better for it, and we now really have a chance to build a different kind of Middle East with a different Iraq in the center of it, with potentially a Palestinian state that is democratic and with changes taking place all over this region that are democratizing, that will be more stabilizing and that will bring greater security to the American people. Saddam Hussein is gone, and that's a good thing.
Contact:
Chris Wallace FNS@foxnews.com
Contact:
George Stephanopoulos
Contact:
Wolf Blitzer Wolf Blitzer
Contact:
ABC E-mail: netaudr@abc.com
Phone: (818) 460-7477
ABC, Inc.
500 S. Buena Vista Street
Burbank, CA 91521-4551
Contact:
CNN CNN
One CNN Center, Box 105366, Atlanta, GA 30303-5366
Phone: 404-827-1500
Fax: 404-827-1906
Contact:
FOX Broadcasting Company E-mail: askfox@foxinc.com
10201 West Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90035
Phone: 310-369-1000
Fax: 310-369-1049
Contact:
FOX News Channel FOX News Channel
1-888-369-4762
Comments@foxnews.com
1211 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10036
Contact:
FOX News Sunday Fox News Sunday
Contact:
Late Edition
Contact:
This Week E-mail: thisweek@abc.com
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From: "Congressman John Conyers, Jr." <campaign@johnconyers.com>
Subject: UPDATE: Downing Street Minutes
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:05:15 -0400
Dear Friend:
Thank you for signing the Downing Street Minutes letter to the president. I personally delivered your letter to the White House last Thursday.
Your participation in this issue has made a difference. The mainstream media has been very slow to report on this British Intelligence document claiming that evidence was being "fixed" to support the lead up to war against Iraq.
Yet, the neither the media nor President Bush could ignore the massive groundswell of interest demonstrated by the more than 560,000 individuals who joined you in signing this letter.
On Thursday, I led a hearing about the Downing Street Minutes to receive testimony from former Ambassador Joe Wilson, 27-year CIA veteran Ray McGovern, constitutional lawyer John Bonifaz, and Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son in Iraq.
Despite desperate attempts by Republicans to disrupt the proceedings, 32 Members of Congress attended this hearing. We were forced to use a cramped room in the basement of the Capitol little bigger than a closet, even though plenty of larger hearing rooms were available. The Republican Leadership also scheduled votes for nearly two straight hours in an unprecedented attempt to limit the ability of Democratic Members of Congress to participate in this hearing.
Thanks to your help, and the more than 560,000 individuals who signed this letter, the mainstream media felt compelled to cover this event. The room was packed with television cameras and there was significant coverage in national newspapers and radio networks. After the hearing I hand delivered the list of signatures along with a letter to the president signed by 122 Members of Congress demanding answers, and led a rally outside the White House.
We still have much more to do to make President Bush answer the questions raised by the Downing Street Minutes. Much work remains for us to bring this issue to the attention of all Americans.
Visit my website at http://johnconyers.com to find out what additional steps we are taking and how you can help on this issue of vital constitutional importance.
Please forward this email to friends who want to sign the letter to the president and help get the truth out.
Sincerely,
Congressman John Conyers, Jr.
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Video Highlights from the Hearing
Conyers Letter to the President
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