W's MD Part III: The War Before The War

The following is from an editorial in the June 9 edition of the Minneapolis StarTribune:

On the subject of when, why and how the United States decided to attack Iraq, American citizens' recent seeming lack of interest has been a puzzle to many in the rest of the world. As the Bush administration's stated reasons for war shifted, ebbed and flowed, many simply went with the flow, finding each succeeding reason -- well, reason enough.

American citizens' recent seeming lack of interest? I seem to recall being very interested in why the mainstream media seemed uninterested in challenging BushCo's stated reasons for war before the goddamn war. Yes, plenty of journalists and even some editors spoke out. But, by and large, while the evidence of a premeditated determination to invade Iraq had been around for some time, not many media outlets chose to dig too deeply or make much noise. In essence, American citizens were conditioned not to think about it while being simultaneously bombarded with savage and thoughtless warmongering from the likes of Judith Miller and Willaim Safire, to name but a pair. Whenever serious questions arise, the media rushes to allow equal time, what The Daily Show's Jon Stewart aptly described as "Well, that's the Left and the Right and we've had that discussion," noting that this isn't journalism, it's reporting.

And where was the American mainstream media? Getting lapped, in NASCAR nomelcature.

When the so-called Downing Street memo came up in a question directed to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush at their joint news conference in Washington, the two leaders answered in such a way as to spur headlines like the one on Page 1 of Wednesday's Star Tribune: "A joint denial of Iraq memo." People who've paid casual attention to news of the secret document might variously assume now that Bush and Blair had dismissed the memo as a forgery or denied that its contents were true -- or both. A careful reading of the two men's words, however, shows that they denied much less than one might think; it also brings up pertinent questions that the president should be pressed to answer.

The memo is actually the minutes of a meeting of Blair and his highest officials on July 23, 2002, eight months before the invasion of Iraq. Leaked to the Sunday Times of London, it was printed on May 1. The memo contained this description of what was said by Sir Richard Dearlove, or "C," the head of Britain's foreign intelligence service: "C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam [Hussein], through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." [Ibid]

The Washington Post seems downright baffled that this revelatory document is still generating interest while missing the irony that the American press is at pains to avoid the subject altogether:

More than a month after its publication, the so-called Downing Street Memo remains among the top 10 most viewed articles on The Times of London site.

It's not hard to see why this remarkable document, published in The Times on May 1 (and reported in this column on May 3), continues to attract reader interest around the world, especially with British Prime Minister Tony Blair visiting Washington Tuesday....

The story attracted some news coverage in the United States, but not much. Last month, the Chicago Tribune concluded that "the Downing Street memo story has proven to be something of a dud in the United States.

The Washington Post

Something of a dud? Or just too hot to handle? When the subject comes up, Administration and Republican party officials are allowed to skate like so many Brian Boitanos. The Washington Post again:

On Sunday, "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert asked Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman about the memo. Mehlman said "that report has been discredited by everyone else who's looked at it since then."

When Russert noted that the authenticity of the report has not been discredited, Mehlman said "I believe that the findings of the report, the fact that the intelligence was somehow fixed have been totally discredited by everyone who's looked at it."

Mehlman referred specifically to the Senate Intelligence Committee's July 2004 report on pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction which concluded that the Bush administration's findings were "overstated" and "not supported by the underlying intelligence reporting." The report attributed the mistakes to "group think" in the intelligence community, not to pressure from the administration officials.

Really?

A Senior Pentagon policy maker created an unofficial "Iraqi intelligence cell" in the summer of 2002 to circumvent the CIA and secretly brief the White House on links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'eda, according to the Senate intelligence committee.

The allegations about Douglas Feith, the number three at the Department of Defence, are made in a supplementary annexe of the committee's review of the intelligence leading to war in Iraq, released on Friday.

According to dramatic testimony contained in the annexe, Mr Feith's cell undermined the credibility of CIA judgments on Iraq's alleged al-Qa'eda links within the highest levels of the Bush administration.

The cell appears to have been set up by Mr Feith as an adjunct to the Office of Special Plans, a Pentagon intelligence-gathering operation established in the wake of 9/11 with the authority of Paul Wolfowitz. Its focus quickly became the al-Qa'eda-Saddam link.

On occasion, without informing the then head of the CIA, George Tenet, the group gave counter-briefings in the White House. Sen Jay Rockefeller, the most senior Democrat on the committee, said that Mr Feith's cell may even have undertaken "unlawful" intelligence-gathering initiatives.

The Telegraph

Now, would any of this be of interest to the "average American citizen"? Without coverage, it's a bit hard to say. In a marvelous cart before the horse moment, the Washington Post put it this way:

"We have The Sunday Times to thank for this very important activity. It reminds me of Watergate, which started off as a tiny little incident reported in The Washington Post. I think that the interest of many citizens is picking up," Conyers said.

So is journalistic interest.

Get it? Americans take interest in a story the press has ignored and the press can't really ignore it anymore. In fact, reporters are reporting how remarkable it is that other reporters are reporting about this story. It's as if we're being told: 'Look, media consumers, how can we tell you what to think if you start thinking for yourselves?'

I sense a trend.

Next thing you know, Americans might get interested in another aspect of this story that our media are ignoring. The war before the war:

Britain and the US carried out a secret bombing campaign against Iraq months before the tanks went over the border in March 2003. Michael Smith pieces together the evidence

Page by relentless page, evidence has been stacking up for many months to show that - despite Tony Blair's denials - the British government signed up for war in Iraq almost a year before the invasion. What most people will not have realised until now, however, was that Britain and the US waged a secret war against Iraq for months before the tanks rolled over the border in March 2003. Documentary evidence and ministerial answers in parliament reveal the existence of a clandestine bombing campaign designed largely to provoke Iraq into taking action that could be used to justify the start of the war.

In the absence of solid legal grounds for war, in other words, the allies tried to bomb Saddam Hussein into providing their casus belli. And when that didn't work they just stepped up the bombing rate, in effect starting the conflict without telling anyone.

The main evidence lies in leaked documents relating to a crucial meeting chaired by the Prime Minister in July 2002 - the documents which supported the Sunday Times story, published during this past election campaign, about how Blair promised George W Bush in April that year that Britain would back regime change....

Donald Rumsfeld had ordered a more aggressive approach, authorising allied aircraft to attack Iraqi command and control centres as well as actual air defences. The US defence secretary later said this was simply to prevent the Iraqis attacking allied aircraft, but Hoon's remark gives the game away. In reality, as he explained, the "spikes of activity" were designed "to put pressure on the regime".

What happened next was dramatic. In September, the amount of ordnance used in the southern no-fly zone increased sharply to 54.6 tonnes. It declined in October to 17.7 tonnes before rising again to 33.6 tonnes in November and 53.2 tonnes in December. The spikes were getting taller and taller.

In fact, as it became clear that Saddam Hussein would not provide them with the justification they needed to launch the air war, we can see that the allies simply launched it anyway, beneath the cloak of the no-fly zone.

New Statesman

When the provocation did not incite the desired response, i.e., Iraq did not retaliate, the administration was forced to rely solely on the intelligence they'd been distorting all along. The propaganda machine was slammed into overdrive. Why? The War On Terror? The threat of WMD? How about the culture of conspicuous consumption that rules the military industrial complex and the petroleum industry?

MOYERS: Let me come back to your first concern. I mean, why aren't these military budgets not watched as carefully by the Defense Department as a corporation? Why isn't the Department of Defense being held accountable?

SPINNEY: Well, you raise a very good point. The President is holding education people accountable for standards. He says, "I want to have measures, performance measures for accountability." He also has tried to do the same for foreign aid if you recall.

Over in the Pentagon, we're not holding people accountable.

I think basically here is you have in Congress the oversight committees for defense, which are essentially the armed services committee. And the defense appropriations subcommittees in both houses are so tied in to the Pentagon and the defense contractor base that essentially oversight has been displaced by what some of us call overlook. They're basically watching the money flow out the door and encouraging it to go.

And basically it's in members of the Senate Armed Services Committee's best interest to keep the money flowing. It's in the Pentagon's best interest to keep the money flowing.

MOYERS: Because?

SPINNEY: It's in the defense contractors' best interest to keep the money flowing. Because it's the military industrial Congressional complex and this is their way of life. They live on the money flow.

MOYERS: The military industrial Congressional complex?

SPINNEY: Right. Which I believe was a term that Eisenhower considered using in his speech, but he dropped the reference to Congress.

MOYERS: He talked about the military industrial complex. But you say Congress is the driving force here?

SPINNEY: I don't think there's any simple villain that you can point to and say, "If we fix this, everything's gonna change. In my opinion it's the product of a long-term evolution that occurred in the 40 years of Cold War. If you think about it those 40 years were a very unique period in our nation's history. Now what happened was during that period the different players in the military industrial Congressional complex basically fine-tuned their bureaucratic behavior to exist in that environment. It was almost like this self-contained environment in which a peculiar evolution took place....

And one of the most pernicious effects of this trend was the gradual build up of what an anthropologist might call habitual modes of conduct. Sort of almost like an innate response of threat inflation. We literally exaggerated a threat to jack up the budgets.

Please read the complete transcript of Bill Moyers's interview with Pentagon insider Chuck Spinney. Then take a nice long walk and think it over.

W's MD Part II: The Nuke-u-ler Option

The Cold War should have taught the world all we ever needed to know about brinksmanship. For one thing, we learned that deterrence might prevent an attack but it doesn't prevent the development of ever-deadlier weapons. We also learned that the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) isn't something that threatens only heads of state and their unfortunate, terrified citizens but something that hangs over the heads of every damn one of us.

Leave it to BushCo, then, to turn back the clock into the middle of the Twentieth Century.

Under the cloak of secrecy imparted by use of military code names, the American administration has been taking a big - and dangerous - step that will lead to the transformation of the nuclear bomb into a legitimate weapon for waging war.

Ever since the terror attack of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has gradually done away with all the nuclear brakes that characterized American policy during the Cold War. No longer are nuclear bombs considered "the weapon of last resort." No longer is the nuclear bomb the ultimate means of deterrence against nuclear powers, which the United States would never be the first to employ....

Remember the code name "CONPLAN 8022." Last week, the Washington Post reported that this unintelligible nickname masks a military program whose implementation could drag the world into nuclear war.

CONPLAN 8022 is a series of operational plans prepared by Startcom, the U.S. Army's Strategic Command, which calls for preemptive nuclear strikes against Iran and North Korea. One of the plan's major components is the use of nuclear weapons to destroy the underground facilities where North Korea and Iran are developing their nuclear weapons. The standard ordnance deployed by the Americans is not capable of destroying these facilities.

The quote is from the Isreali paper Haaretz. The source link seems to be out of order, but the above selection should suffice.

Nuclear deterrence is arguably effective against nation states. But how on earth does this policy deter terrorists? For that matter, how on earth would another wave of proliferation deter states from aiding and abetting free radicals in their pursuit of nuclear weapons?

The spectacular failure of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference was predictable at the outset and is overwhelmingly attributable to the nuclear policies of the Bush administration and its unwillingness to accept US obligations for nuclear disarmament under the treaty. The Bush administration simply does not seem to understand that it cannot go back on previous US commitments under the treaty and continue to promote nuclear weapons in its own arsenal, while exhorting other nations to forego their nuclear options.

The treaty is crumbling under the double standards of American policy. It may not be able to recover from the rigid and do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do positions of the Bush administration, which are viewed by most of the world as high-level nuclear hypocrisy.

Common Dreams

Ah, but hypocrisy is in the eye of The Beholder:

Seize your armor, gird it on
Now the battle will be won
Soon, your enemies all slain
Crowns of glory you shall gain

From "Soldiers of the Cross, Arise"