My rambling tirade for January
1/12/04

Here it is again, my semi-monthly political wrap-up for January 2004.

The beginning of the New Year sees us losing our U.S troops in Iraq at about the same clip as before Saddam was captured and the reasons for them being there in the first place are being shown to be even more questionable than ever.

On January 7th Barton Gellman wrote in the Washington Post an interesting article on the pathetic state of the Iraqi WMD program before the war. His conclusion is that Iraq's capabilities of threatening anyone in the region or in the U.S. was nonexistent. The most striking part of the piece was the discovery of a memo written by Hossam Amin, the head of Iraq's National Monitoring Directorate, the liaison to the U.N. inspectors. The memo, sent to Saddam's son Qusay, spelled out all the secrets Kamel Hussein, Saddam's son-in-law, had given U.N. inspectors after his defection to Jordan in 1995.

For a long time U.S. intelligence experts and U.N. inspectors questioned whether Kamel had really told them all he knew and tended to discount his information. With this contemporary handwritten memo we now know Kamel Hussein's information was totally correct. Iraq had destroyed all their chemical and biological weapons in 1991 and had no functioning nuclear program. Gellman suggests Saddam's own scientists lied to him about the extent of the programs in order to save their own necks and keep the money flowing. I have a copy of the secret UNSCOM/IAEA debrief of Kamel Hussein, you can get it at www.fair.org

Remember those pesky aluminum tubes Colin Powell spoke about at the U.N. on February 5, 2003, the ones that were being used as centrifuges for enriching uranium? Camel Hussein said: "They manufacture their own centrifuges in two ways. One way was from maraging {sic} steel and the second-using carbon fibers. All centrifuges worked but they preferred the ones made of carbon fiber...this would be done in a different area but the activity was stopped by the war." Professor Zifferero of the IAEA asked, "Were there any continuation of, or present nuclear activities, for example, EMIS centrifuge? Hussein answered," No, but blueprints are still on microfiches." This fits right in with Gellman's contention that Iraq's weapons programs existed only on paper, or microfiches.

Two days after Gellman's article, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released a report on pre-war intelligence. A six-month's study of all documents and related information concluded the intelligence was manufactured to fit a decision that had already been made to go to war. According to the Financial Times the report," describes nascent efforts to develop long-range missiles and viruses, but neither of these appear to have left the drawing board. The evidence suggests there was no reconstituted nuclear program, as alleged by vice-president Dick Cheney in August 2002, when he said, 'We now know that Saddam Hussein resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.'"

Based on the overwhelming evidence of the massive intelligence failures before the war, the Carnegie report recommends that the strike first-ask questions later approach to diplomacy be scrapped. The Financial Times goes on to say," the evidence showed that the constraints provided by the pre-war policy of sanctions, weapons inspectors, and military action did work to stop the effective development of Iraqi weapons programs." Even Colin Powell agreed with this assessment back in February of 2001," He (Saddam) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."

Saddam being a brutal dictator isn't the issue. Bush would have never been able to convince the American people that losing over 500 troops dead and over 9000 wounded was worth over-throwing Saddam Hussein. There is no evidence of weapons of mass destruction and no threat to the U.S.- so what are we doing over there? There must be an accounting made for this loss of blood and treasure.

Either, the Bush administration and the pentagon were totally suckered by Ahmad Chalabi and his bunch of misfits from the "Iraqi National Congress," or there was a conscience decision made, regardless of the facts which were obvious, to invade another country to get control of its oil wealth and project American imperial power throughout the Middle East. I tend to lean towards the latter considering that the whole script was written back in the nineties by the Project for the New American Century and has been followed to the letter ever since "W" got into power. The neocons who wrote it are now, even as we speak, hatching their new plans for another four years of Bush/Cheney. Go to your local bookstore and read all about it. "An End To Terror" by David Frum (Mr. Axis-of-Evil) and Richard Perle, is the blueprint for the new neocon agenda.

Bush's former Treasury Secretary has said plans were in the works to invade Iraq three days after the administration got into office. At the same time discussions were started on doling out oil contracts to other countries.

Your homework for this month is to find out more about the Office of Special Plans in the pentagon. Check out "the Lie Factory" in this month's Mother Jones for more info. There will more on this next time. .

[3/09/04: Additional info related to this post.This is from "The Gun and the Olive Branch" by David Hirst
review of book: http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1046646,00.html?=rss
"...some Israelis began to wonder out loud whether the prot?g? had now turned the tables on the superpower patron; whether, in the words of novelist and celebrated jazz musician Gilad Atzmon, America was `about to lose its sovereignty...becoming a remote colony of an apparently far greater state, the Jewish state...very small place in the eastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea' though it might be.'we must remember,' he went on, `that this kind of strange scenario does happen. Last month I heard Israel Shamir's [an anti-Zionist Israeli historian and peace activist] observation regarding this very issue. In a very open manner he said that no one would be surprised to hear that during different phases of the British Empire that world was governed by a very close group of Eton graduates. "Sometimes", he added, "great empires are taken over by very marginal groups." We might have to acknowledge that this is the case with America. American foreign policy is dictated by a very marginal group of Zionist activists, even by the state of Israel itself.']

More on the Office of Special Plans
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0311/dailyUpdate.html?s=entt

let's talk rip-off 'o4
Ever get the feeling a democratic presidential victory in November might not be the end of Bush and his band of ideologues? I have a hard time believing they wouldn't do anything it took to stay in power.

It seems that some on the right view our very system of government as a liberal plot that must be crushed. For example; Grover Norquist's dream of draining the tub then strangling the baby (i.e. the government) with ever more tax cuts; the Patriot Act, the de-funding of Social Security and public education, Tom Delay and Darrel Issa perverting the electoral system, the stacking of the courts with like-minded fellow travelers, the list goes on and on. The end result? A fundamental sea change is under way and the democratic institutions we all take for granted are being pulled right out from under us.

Might another major terrorist attack, or some other kind of "crisis," in the US during the period between the election and the inauguration call for extraordinary measures? Might these revolutionaries in the White House not suspend or cancel any election result not favorable to their crusade against terror?

That scenario might not be so far-fetched. Tommy Franks, commander of Operation Iraqi Freedom, said another 9/11-type disaster would probably lead to martial law and the suspension of the constitution. Already two American citizens and thousands of foreign residents who were never charged with a crime have been put behind bars without being able to see a lawyer. The first concentration camp is already up and running in Cuba. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has plans for seven more to be set up during an emergency at military bases around the United States under the code name REX-84. Set up by Oliver North during the Reagan administration, REX-84 calls for the rounding up and detention of thousands of opponents of the government. Who these new American "enemy combatants" might be is anyone's guess. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that there is an ever-growing list of names being compiled somewhere in the bowels of the pentagon, just in case?

The question is; what would be considered a major crisis? $8 million of the $87 billion Iraq emergency appropriation went to the Miami police department for combating anti-globalization protesters at the FTAA meetings last November.

The war on terror doesn't stop at our borders. Neither, apparently, does the war on our basic civil liberties.

History is full of examples of well-ordered and long existing political systems overthrown by a small group of revolutionaries with relative ease. In many cases the establishment never saw it coming. Neocon ideologues on the fringe were writing their crackpot position papers in the nineties and were largely ignored. Once in power, they turned their warped theories into reality on the ground in Iraq and around the world. The United States is now ruling 50 million Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq. And diplomacy, the constitutional function of the State Department, has been circumvented by the pentagon. Donald Rumsfeld is telling other nations to jump and how high to jump. John Ashcroft, a religious fanatic, is dispensing vengeance from on high, political commissars are overseeing the running all the federal agencies, and the very backbone of our government, the civil service, is being outsourced to the highest bidding private corporation. Our fundamental way of life is under threat; declaring elections void is not such a big step when you understand what's been done right under our noses so far.

It can't happen here? It may have already happened. The corpse is just late for its own funeral.