ABC News reports today on Diane Sawyer’s recent interview with former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Rumsfeld claims:
Powell — along with other top Bush administration officials and advisers — truly believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction at the time of his famous presentation to the United Nations in February 2003.
The truth, however, is that everyone knew that Iraq didn’t have WMDs.
ABC also notes:
Asked if he turned the conversation inside the administration to Iraq in the wake of 9/11, Rumsfeld said “absolutely not.”
But as I have repeatedly pointed out, the reality is that Rumsfeld tried to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to attack Iraq:
5 hours after the 9/11 attacks, Donald Rumsfeld said “my interest is to hit Saddam”.
He also said “Go massive . . . Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is currently saying that Dick Cheney’s vision of policy towards the Middle East after 9/11 was to re-draw the map ….
***
What does this mean?
Well, as I have repeatedly pointed out, the “war on terror” in the Middle East has nothing to do with combating terror, and everything to do with remaking that region’s geopolitical situation to America’s advantage.
For example, as I noted in January::
Starting right after 9/11 — at the latest — the goal has always been to create “regime change” and instability in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Lebanon; the goal was never really to destroy Al Qaeda. As American reporter Gareth Porter writes in Asia Times:
Three weeks after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld established an official military objective of not only removing the Saddam Hussein regime by force but overturning the regime in Iran, as well as in Syria and four other countries in the Middle East, according to a document quoted extensively in then-under secretary of defense for policy Douglas Feith’s recently published account of the Iraq war decisions. Feith’s account further indicates that this aggressive aim of remaking the map of the Middle East by military force and the threat of force was supported explicitly by the country’s top military leaders.
Feith’s book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing “new regimes” in a series of states…
***
General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia [and Lebanon].
***
When this writer asked Feith . . . which of the six regimes on the Clark list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, he replied, “All of them.”
***
The Defense Department guidance document made it clear that US military aims in regard to those states would go well beyond any ties to terrorism. The document said the Defense Department would also seek to isolate and weaken those states and to “disrupt, damage or destroy” their military capacities – not necessarily limited to weapons of mass destruction (WMD)…
Rumsfeld’s paper was given to the White House only two weeks after Bush had approved a US military operation in Afghanistan directed against bin Laden and the Taliban regime. Despite that decision, Rumsfeld’s proposal called explicitly for postponing indefinitely US airstrikes and the use of ground forces in support of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in order to try to catch bin Laden.
Instead, the Rumsfeld paper argued that the US should target states that had supported anti-Israel forces such as Hezbollah and Hamas.
***
After the bombing of two US embassies in East Africa [in 1998] by al-Qaeda operatives, State Department counter-terrorism official Michael Sheehan proposed supporting the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan against bin Laden’s sponsor, the Taliban regime. However, senior US military leaders “refused to consider it”, according to a 2004 account by Richard H Shultz, Junior, a military specialist at Tufts University.
A senior officer on the Joint Staff told State Department counter-terrorism director Sheehan he had heard terrorist strikes characterized more than once by colleagues as a “small price to pay for being a superpower”.
No wonder former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski told the Senate that the war on terror is “a mythical historical narrative”.
***
The number two man at the State Department, Lawrence Wilkerson, said:
The vice president and the secretary of defense created a “Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal” that hijacked U.S. foreign policy.
***
And at 2:40 p.m. on September 11th, in a memorandum of discussions between top administration officials, several lines below the statement “judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [that is, Saddam Hussein] at same time”, is the statement “Hard to get a good case.” In other words, top officials knew that there wasn’t a good case that Hussein was behind 9/11, but they wanted to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to justify war with Iraq anyway.
Moreover, “Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the [9/11] attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda”.
And a Defense Intelligence Terrorism Summary issued in February 2002 by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency cast significant doubt on the possibility of a Saddam Hussein-al-Qaeda conspiracy.
And yet Bush, Cheney and other top administration officials claimed repeatedly for years that Saddam was behind 9/11. See this analysis. Indeed, Bush administration officials apparently swore in a lawsuit that Saddam was behind 9/11.
Moreover, President Bush’s March 18, 2003 letter to Congress authorizing the use of force against Iraq, includes the following paragraph:
(2) acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Therefore, the Bush administration expressly justified the Iraq war to Congress by representing that Iraq planned, authorized, committed, or aided the 9/11 attacks. See this.
Indeed, the torture program which Cheney created was specifically aimed at producing false confessions in an attempt to link Iraq and 9/11.
Rumsfeld had a big hand in torture as well.
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You have not made the case that the administration knew that there were no WMDs. The closest anyone comes to a cogent argument is that everyone was told that there were no WMDs. I am guessing someone also told them there are UFO’s and global warming.
I am a believer that they believed dangerously incorrect information. And you cannot say I know better.
A blogger named Marcy Wheeler, who writes as Emptywheel and is now part of the FireDogLake blogsite, has done superlative research and analysis now since at least 2005 on WMD, the Iraq War, the Plame Leak and its subsequent investigation, torture, and a host of related topics.
On her blogsite are links to a number of Timelines, among which the most critical for WMD is probably her Ghorbanifar Timeline. It reveals a series of what almost might be described as cat-and-mouse back-and-forth interactions between certain forces who probably tried to plant WMD in Iraq as pretext for war; what occurred to interrupt the implementation is anyone’s guess. In addition, her Torture Timelines provide substantial heft to support claims that prior to the outbreak of the Iraq War the US and one of its allies tried to extract confessions linking Saddam to Al Quaeda.
I suppose your views on Rumsfeld’s complicity would depend on your criteria for evidence. In my own case, the accumulated weight of Marcy Weheeler’s work, along with a growing body of investigative reporters, has been persuasive. Clearly, you view things somewhat differently, and we all should agree to differ in a civil fashion. For the present, I assume that you are unaware of the breathtaking reach of Emptywheel’s expertise.
As for motives, Mark Pontin’s comment below synchs with what I’ve been able to suss out. Incompetent as Bush was, he was almost certainly not willing to let Saddam, nor anyone else, control that oil wealth. It was quite clear reading IraqOilReport in 2006, 2007 that the Oil Majors were slavering to get into Iraq, and were insistent on ‘democracy’ as a means o fprotecting contracts. ‘Nation building’ is often code for ‘we want to have enforceable contracts’, but not much else.
Bob, read Seymour Hersh’s “Chain of Command” for proof that the Bush Admin repeatedly ignored information from both government agencies and even Iraqi expats about the status of WMD when it didn’t fit their worldview. They repeatedly puffed up nebulous information and obvious fakery (such as the “Niger” documents) when it suited their purposes. They created an atmosphere of sycophancy among the Joint Chiefs, the various other agencies, and the military, rewarding those who told them there were WMDs and disdaining those who said there weren’t. (ElBaradei?)
You can argue about their motives, but I think it is pretty hard to dispute that Rumsfeld and the rest KNEW they were lying when they told America and the world that Saddam had WMD. I suppose in the end lying and purposely ignoring information aren’t technically the same things, but the results were the same.
It impresses me the extent people go to collect evidence than supports their world view. Your comments are an example of that, so are Rummys.
I don’t need more proof to believe that Goldman acted in bad faith and lied about it. I have not reached the same conclusions about the Bush administrations errors on Iraq.
Let’s see. We have the forged Niger documents. We have Powell plagiarizing a five-year-old graduate thesis based on ten-year-old data with, modified to enhance the propaganda. We have the Downing Street memos indicating that they were determined to fabricate a case to invade Iraq. We have the maps of Iraqi oil fields divvied up among oil companies. We have Bush saying, “&^%$#@! Saddam, we’re taking him out!”
What else do you need?
I agree that Bush probably believed that Iraq had WMDs. But President Bush was/is a Cloud Cuckoolander, living in his own world in the clouds. How else do you explain his claim that free nations do not develop weapons of mass destruction?
Nuclear weapons are in a class of their own as WMD.
WMD is the stupidest term of the last 10 years. It puts chemical weapons on the same level as nuclear weapons, which is completely absurd. Chemical weapons are difficult to deliver in a way that causes mass lethality, whereas one 13KG core plutonium bomb can kill 100’s of thousands.
It can be debated whether the Bush administration knew Saddam had not chemical weapons stockpiles. It’s beyond dispute that then knew there was no active nuclear weapons program.
If Iraq was nowhere near nukes, there was no reason AT ALL to invade, since there was no credible catastrophic threat.
“Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/blumenthal/2007/09/06/bush_wmd
—-
“According to Larry Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff, here’s what Powell was thinking at the time:
WILKERSON: [Powell] had walked into my office musing and he said words to the effect of, I wonder how we’ll all feel if we put half a million troops in Iraq and march from one end of the country to the other and find nothing.”
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/1998
“Rumsfeld lies about Iraq war”?!?! C’mon… If it was, “Rumsfeld is honest, candid about Iraq war”, **then** you’d have some real news!
bob goodwin — they got the information that wanted to get. “Team B”, “stovepiping” were all exercises in reaching a foregone conclusion that **they didn’t even bother to cover up**, that were well documented at the time. All the reverent nonsense about what the “intelligence community” “knew” was more like an old Sumerian’s awe of the priest class. It was plain to any reasonably informed adult that Iraq was a basket case, a tottering state that couldn’t control its own airspace. This was not a country that was going to launch a Manhattan Project on the sly, ever.
There actually was one American intelligence agency that actually did call events in Iraq pretty accurately. You know which? The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. No technology, no fabulous satellite imagery, nothing but a bunch of folks reading open literature from the region.
Naturally, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al ignored them completely.
“they got the information that wanted to get” is not the same as knowing there were no WMDs. The central claim in the above argument is that “everyone knew.” It is an unsupportable claim and probably wrong. Even if they were blinking idiots who only heard evidence that supported their beliefs, the guest post/hit piece lacks intellectual integrity.
“the guest post/hit piece lacks intellectual integrity.”
Ha! That seems fair to me. We ARE talking about the know-it-all autocrat Rumsfeld, after all.
Let’s get real. Rummy and friends needed an excuse to take-over Iraq and put a boot on the Strait of Hormuz. WMDs, democratization, and 9/11 were all mixed into a potent brew of propaganda to justify their intentions, a fog to conceal the real motive: oil.
Was he moving his lips again? I hate it when that happens, it means he’s lying, and HE said he would stop!!
sglover wrote: ‘It was plain to any reasonably informed adult that Iraq was a basket case, a tottering state that couldn’t control its own airspace. This was not a country that was going to launch a Manhattan Project on the sly, ever.’
[1] Weak reasoning. By that logic, North Korea would never have a bomb and yet it does. It takes nothing like a Manhattan project-sized effort to do nuclear weapons these days and it’ll take far less when laser isotope separation goes commercial next year.
[2] Weak data. Saddam had tried to develop nuclear weapons prior to Gulf 1. See for example —
Hamza, Khidhir (September/October 1998). Inside Saddam’s secret nuclear program. “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”.
http://books.google.com/?id=rwsAAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA26.
[3] Yes, the US intervention was absolutely about the oil. But not primarily in the way most people mean.
“Political disorders can be quickly healed if they are seen well in advance,” Machiavelli wrote in The Prince. The masters of such foresight were the ancient Romans, he continued, who “saw when troubles were coming and always took counter-measures. They never, to avoid a war, allowed them to go unchecked, because they knew that there is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others.”
In other words, Iraq represents the world’s second biggest source of oil — which is wealth to support WMD development programs, such as the nuclear program Saddam had already carried further than we realized when Gulf One closed it down. Allowing the likes of Saddam, or his even more psychopathic sons Uday or Qusay, or whomever was adept enough in the Iraqi high command to overthrow them, to control such wealth and have the power that it brings was something that no hegemonic state like the US was likely to tolerate. Especially with sanctions failing and the moment of global peak oil approaching (recall that in 1999 Cheney had forecast that peak oil would arrive in 2008).
In other words, it’s politically incorrect to say but while the Bush administration’s execution was clownishly, ruinously incompetent from a realpolitik viewpoint the intervention made sense.
[4] It’s also politically incorrect to recall now that Hans Blix, Jacques Chirac, some of Saddam’s own generals and the rank and file of the U.S. defense intelligentsia at places like Sandia Labs and such all initially believed that Saddam was probably still running WMD programs.
There was no transparency, no way to know for sure. Saddam had just played his stupid games for too long.
“Weak reasoning. By that logic, North Korea would never have a bomb and yet it does. It takes nothing like a Manhattan project-sized effort to do nuclear weapons these days and it’ll take far less when laser isotope separation goes commercial next year.”
How do we know that North Korea **does** have nuclear weapons? I’ve yet to hear of a test that was, unambiguously, a nuclear detonation. I recall seismic evidence of a very large explosion in North Korea some years ago, but as I recall it was too small for a “usable” weapon.
Further, I note that the Iranian program requires large centrifuge cascades. Maybe not Hanford and Oak Ridge scale (I don’t know), but still a very large industrial operation. A hard thing to hide, I expect, when F-16’s can fly overhead with impunity — as was the case in Iraq.
“Saddam had tried to develop nuclear weapons prior to Gulf 1.”
You’re not seriously maintaining that the Iraq of 2003 was anything like the Iraq of 1989, are you?
Two things:
Scott Ritter, late of the USMC, later head of the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) team in Iraq went from a WMD believer to a WMD denier on the politically correct basis of first hand knowledge. It’s ironic to read his Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem – Once and For All and find the mindset and arguments that were recycled by the Bush Administration, even as he was telling everyone who’d listen that it was not the real situation. I think this was the incident that inspired Colbert’s observation about liberal bias.
But of course, anyone who is in the way of the elite with a lot of liberal reality talk gets hit with the porn slur. Watch out for typing, it’s the devil’s playground. In Detroit you can kill your neighbor and not get that kind of prosecution. I’m still waiting to hear a hundred MSM news stories about our hostess and something about a parrot.
Second, I’m just starting Thomas PM Barnett’s Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating. In it, he’s blunt about using military force in defense of the Functional Core (the nations connected by globalization) against the Non-Integrating Gap (everyone outside globalization). It’s a sequel to his The Pentagon’s New Map. It’s also the New World Order of the Alex Jones paranoid tinfoil hat crew.
The American military is made up of the sons and daughters of the people I grew up with, and live with, and count as my own. Even if they’re the white trash of the flyover states, and ghetto escapees, and the barrio boys, they deserve a little more respect than being used as goons for the wealthy.
I find it comforting that they’re still lying us into war; it means we’re not completely supine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Ritter
Wow, you are a true believer. Did you forget that Saddam was under longstanding international sanctions and heavy surveillance, and that Hans Blix and the UN inspectors were in the country and had ALREADY gone through a significant % of sites (in order of priority, IIRC 75% but my memory could be wrong).
There was no credible reason not to let the UN finish the inspections.
We had satellite surveillance at that point. If Saddam had anything even at the time of the invasion, it would at most be of a scale that it was being moved on trucks. And we were able to monitor that too.
And MOST IMPORTANT, Saddam had NO missile capability beyond very imprecise and limited range Scuds. The only country he posed a threat to even if he had had WMD was Israel.
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
“There’s another way to phrase that and that is that the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. It is basically saying the same thing in a different way. Simply because you do not have evidence that something does exist does not mean that you have evidence that it doesn’t exist.”
I’m not into this detail stuff. I’m more concepty.”
“I don’t do quagmires.”
“I don’t do diplomacy.”
“I don’t do foreign policy.”
“I don’t do predictions.”
“I don’t do numbers.”
“I don’t do book reviews.”
“If I know the answer I’ll tell you the answer, and if I don’t, I’ll just respond, cleverly.”
Well considering that OIF was planned under the Clinton administration and executed under G.W. Bush administration, not surprising. In fact Joe Wilson agreed with Bush and the Senate Intelligence Committee before he joined …… Kerry’s campaign. Useful idiots have been employed by neo-liberals/conservatives to keep power.
I don’t get Sen. Durbin, and it’s pretty much why I think the characterizations of “lies” is so pointless (BS, if you will). A Senator can say whatever he wants on the floor of the Senate and no cone of silence can be imposed nor can the senator be punished for a speech made. That is in the Constitution – the Senate intelligence committee rules are not.
Sen. Durbin’s comment seriously disturbs me, actually. The Consitution doesn’t guaranty that anybody will listen, but senators have some pretty important powers and rights, and Sen. Durbin seems to be admitting that the system overrode those in his case.
Being there isn’t the same thing as leading.
What an upsetting topic. Need an antidote?
http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/02/07/2055516/california-man-killed-by-armed.html
Washington’s Blog is an embarrassment to Naked Capitalism, why it gets continued links and articles I haven’t a clue.
Repeat the last line over and over please…
The last line, the last line, the last line, the last line, the last line, the last line, the last line, the last line.
Should something be happening yet?
“The truth, however, is that everyone knew that Iraq didn’t have WMDs.”
i do not agree with this. even with the evidence of cooked intel, etc…. there are still accounts of legitimate debates about the WMD question in the CIA, the media, even in anti-war circles. the question itself is virtually unknowable by its nature (prove a negative). the result was that anti-war folks decided they had a better solution to the WMD problem than the pro-war folks. not that there was no WMD problem. ie inspections, flyovers, sanctions, seizures, etc, intead of invasion, mass death, etc.
<>
“i do not agree with this.”
Fine.
“even with the evidence of cooked intel, etc…. there are still accounts of legitimate debates about the WMD question in the CIA, the media, even in anti-war circles. the question itself is virtually unknowable by its nature (prove a negative).”
I had no certainty that there were NO WMDs (at all). I was actually a bit surprised that after starting the war, they were unable to come up with any examples, that I can recall, of something that could be called a WMD. The total and complete void did surprise me.
I was, from my not well informed vantage point, pretty convinced that the WMD story was overblown and was not sufficient justification to start another war. (I had the privilege, in my youth, of walking through the jungles and paddies of Vietnam.) I didn’t think we could be stupid enough to do it again in my own lifetime.
One main reason to question the existence of any dangerous WMDs, was that we had inspectors running around all over Iraq, looking for such things, almost continuously since the end of the 1st Gulf War. Were the inspectors incompetent or is it reasonable to say the WMD story was very questionable?
“… the result was that anti-war folks decided they had a better solution to the WMD problem than the pro-war folks. not that there was no WMD problem.”
I just explained why I think there was no REAL WMD problem. I’m guessing you were sold that we should go kick some ass, just to be sure, and maybe now you aren’t willing to accept that the result of that choice was a big multi-year mess. Other than killing Sadam did it accomplish anything?
“… ie inspections, flyovers, sanctions, seizures, etc, intead of invasion, mass death, etc.”
I think we had already done, for years, all of the stuff you listed as alternatives to war. I argue that it had already worked and nothing, really, needed to be done. I still think the “invasion, mass death, etc.,” that we did do, did not play out all that well for anyone except the groups making the tools of war and (in this war, particularly) vending actual on-site contractors and mercenaries.
The weapons inspectors were not in Iraq continuously. Saddam threw them out for spying and they were not allowed in for some years. From his point of view, as he had no WMDs left, the only reason they were still running around was so the West could spy on Iraq. Then in the runup to the war they were let in again and found no WMDs (though they did come across a few missiles with a range beyond what was allowed).
In the National Intelligence Estimates the best informed agencies on every beat said there were no WMD. The record on this point is very clear.
I am not sure how to parse your last comment. It sounds a bit like “the fastest turtles clearly moved forward”. The record is also abundantly clear that there were intellegence reports supporting WMD. Those reports were wrong. And that faulty pretext was partially responsible for going into a war we should have avoided. It seems that history is full of examples of leaders making poor decisions with incomplete information. How does this prove intent?
What would satisfy you most?
1. An admission from the perpetrators themselves? It sure made a funny joke at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. How about that one percent doctrine?
2. Preponderance of evidence? Plenty of hearsay is available, but you’ll have to wait 70 years to know the whole story, just like JFK, RFK, J. Edgar Hoover, etc. See you at SMU in 2078.
3. Testimony of accessories? How about that PNAC report? How about our history of selling weapons to both Iran and Iraq and subsequent monitoring of their use? How about Israel’s response, since they have a long history of successful espionage and wet work?
4. Howzabout that Eric Holder actually did his job and investigated war crimes? Naganahapen.
Or one could play cute on the internet. It beats sticking your neck out.
How about *kicking too the curb* (in broad day light, in international MSM, like a shot across the bow)) of an active agent that had evidence contrary to their goals.
Why would one argue over such a limited data point, when there is a preponderance of empirical historical action with in the last 40 years alone, to these kinds of events…is absurd.
Bob…as someone that has obvious expertize in corporate dealings, yet be so blind, when it comes to such thinly veiled bias / manufacture of outcomes, by the masters during this time…is…well…telling.
Skippy…would Orwell have such simplistic actors, no one would have bothered reading his works.
..are people still this naiive?…noooo, just as Vietnam era, they are in denial…those of us who knew from the beginning were 100% accurate. Read this:
http://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vp01.cfm?outfit=pmt&folder=2053&paper=3010
it’s been out forever…James Bamford who wrote it has written three authoritive books on NSA=”Puzzle Palace” and “Body of Secrets”. I have confirmed his expertise with
“Sig-Int” friend. Bamford also notes in article, “Rendon Group”=read what John Rendon says about “next time (we do war propaganda)”, and about phoney intel.
Vincent Cannestraro, ex-CIA intel, stated on C-Span (and in
“The Dark Side”) that Cheney called him in several times, asking for intel that didn’t exist, kept telling Cannestraro
that the intel he had didn’t match the non-intel CIA had..
Cannestraro states “I could only conclude he (Cheney) had an AGENDA to go into Iraq”)..who would have guessed…well,
definately “Project For A New American Century” neocons would have guessed, as they wrote the concept and tried to
foist it off on Clinton…
are fundamentalists STILL attempting to DENY all this???
(quick, change the subject to U.N. sanctions, or some other nonsense that can also be easily debunked..)
read the Bamford article, completely documented regarding the German prisoner, whom German intel literally stated was “unreliable”…read Wilkerson (Powell’s righthand man) discussion of Powell’s reaction to finding out HIS intel was contrived=not validated by other sources…
fundamentalists in denial..what a surprise…
For fundamentalists-you should at least know who you are following=”Project For A New American Century”=neocons:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Project_for_the_New_American_Century
peruse the names and agenda…fyi..
Yves Smith says:
February 8, 2011 at 12:12 am
In the National Intelligence Estimates the best informed agencies on every beat said there were no WMD. The record on this point is very clear.
The neo-con response to this problem was to create the Office of Special Plans, which distorted or fabricated information about Iraq’s purported WMDs before, during, and after the invasion. Located in the Pentagon, OSP was headed by neo-con Douglas Feith, reported to neo-con Paul Wolfowitz, and relied on an analyst, Larry Franklin, who was subsequently convicted of spying for an Israeli lobbying group. A similar organization, the Iranian Directorate, was later created to justify the neo-cons’ desire for war with Iran.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jul/17/iraq.usa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Franklin_espionage_scandal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Directorate
According to then-Air Force Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, whose responsibilities included Iraq-related intelligence, OSP took complete control of the intelligence process and intelligence personnel in order to create the assessments the neocons wanted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Kwiatkowski She wrote:
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0310-09.htm
OSP, according to Kwiatkowski, censored reports that contradicted their agenda, spread disinformation, and effectively overrode the standard chain of command. Her objections to the actions of OSP ended her career, and made her a target of public attacks by Republicans and neo-cons.
Subsequent investigations by the Pentagon inspector general and Senate Armed Services Committee largely backed her charges. According to Wikipedia, Senator Carl Levin, Chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, stated that
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Special_Plans#Allegations_of_manipulation_of_intelligence
Other allegations regarding OSP include:
* Sending unauthorized paramilitary and mercenary teams into Iraq before, after, and during the invasion. http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Secretive_military_unit_sought_to_solve_0105.html These units sometimes interfered with the units that the military assigned to secure WMD sites.
* Once it was clear there were no WMDS, OSP allegedly tried to find captured Iraqis willing to _falsely_ claim that there were. http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Secretive_military_unit_sought_to_solve_0105.html
* Improperly shared intelligence directly with members of the Israeli Likud Party, often bypassing both US channels and the Mossad. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jul/17/iraq.usa
I have some questions about the “good guys” here, relatively speaking, Wesley Clark and Colin Powell.
On 9/11, Wesley Clark and Lawrence Eagleburger were guests on CNN. Lawrence Eagleburger was rarin to go kill people, even if they weren’t THE people who were responsible. Transcript and link to video here: http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/11/27/john-bellinger-if-the-war-is-illegal-just-change-the-law/#comment-265748
– snip –
LAWRENCE EAGLEBURGER: Well, what you do, what you do is strike at them militarily. I know this is going to sound awful, but my point is there’s only one way to begin to deal with people like this is you have to kill some of them, even if they’re not immediately, directly involved in this thing. We do know that the Taliban and the government of Aghanistan has mothered Osama bin Laden for years. They need, they need to be hit — either they need to be hit or they need to understand very quickly that they have got to stop supporting terrorism and then make it evident that they’re stopping the terrorism.
CNN JUDY WOODRUFF: So you’re not talking about a long, drawn-out investigation as they had with Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie.
LAWRENCE EAGLEBURGER: I hope not.
CNN JUDY WOODRUFF: A long, drawn-out effort to extradite possible suspects…
LAWRENCE EAGLEBURGER: I hope not. I hope not.
– snip –
That’s a Republican ex-Secretary of State.
Wesley Clark was also a guest that afternoon. As a future Democratic presidential candidate, you’d think he’d be the counterpoint of Eagleburger. But he really wasn’t. Just like Eagleburger, he was proposing acting extrajudicially because courts just weren’t good enough. (How is it that CNN got THOSE guests?)
Transcript and link to video at http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/11/27/john-bellinger-if-the-war-is-illegal-just-change-the-law/#comment-265746
The other question I have is about Colin Powell. The first detainee, Detainee 001, was John Walker Lindh, the so-called “American Taliban.” He was a kid from Marin County California who had gone to the Middle East to study Islam, joined the Taliban to defend villagers against the Northern Alliance when we were on the Taliban side, and never realized that the United States switched sides. I’m paraphrasing from memory of his parents’ interview on Democracy Now (http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/31/exclusive_john_walker_lindhs_parents_discuss). Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous December 2001 “take the gloves off” memo was about Lindh. When Lindh was captured/rescued, and things started taking the turn they did, he asked to see a lawyer. On the other side of the world, when his parents learned their son was a prisoner, they hired a lawyer who immediately contacted Tenet, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and Powell and asked to see his client. So, from both sides, request to see lawyer/client. But that was refused (a direct Constitutional hit). Where was Powell then? That’s my question. Lindh got sent off for two months of secret “interrogations” aboard the USS Bataan before a sham trial and judicial gagging which he is still under.
Here’s Frank Lindh on his son in 2006 (http://www.alternet.org/story/31211/?page=entire):
“What I find most troubling about this treatment, however, was that it was completely gratuitous and unnecessary. John Lindh did not need to be tortured in order to tell American forces what he knew, where he had been and what he had seen. He was glad to be rescued, he had nothing to hide. I cannot fathom why the military would have felt it necessary to humiliate him in this way.”
..New York Times did an exceptional piece of investigative reporting 2 years after internationally illegal invasion of
Iraq, which documented retired generals used by corporate media to support Iraq invasion, and their LINKS to military-industrial complex. They were given Pentagon (my Dad has grade 1 Pentagon clearance) talking points in meetings for the week, prior to television appearances. These deceptions
were simply disinformation, which is the reason I mentioned
Bamford’s expose’ on “Rendon Group” who DID the disinformation campaigns on Panama and Iraq.
CIA and FBI computer disinformation complexes are now being constructed to make certain Rendon’s description of being able to totally control future message is accurate..
DENIAL is obvious, neocon fundamentalist followers…here’s the documentation;
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/us/20generals.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
boy, it is amazing to see the depth of the BS some of these lies and deceptions. i wonder who is paying them. im sure the cost of selling out is more than any truth involved.
after all, starting with Reagan, the lies and the BS has been very consistent. i mean, this aint no cheap psyops, after al,l this is the age of GREED.
it is fun though. the whole BS lines are brought up over and over. i guess you have to be on the “other side” of the lies to see the games being performed. Maybe they think they can’t be seen as the “bought” ones when they “protest too much” of their “innocence”. no reasoning or common sense is allowed. eventually all those dumb and uneducated Americans have gradually seen the BS/Big Lie for what it is.
a grab by the Rich for Oil. so what else is new?
these people are entertaining though.
such idiots.for thinking we are idiots. lol.
Yes, use the “Yves method” follow the money. Were any of the principals close to the money? Hint; begins w/H
I remember living behind a church were Brian Lamb, and a bunch of these Cspan guys used too have a wood shop. At that place of residence my mom thought I needed an exorcist, after playing in the mud the way very young children will sometimes with my uncle who mixed a glass of this red clay in water and told me it was chocolate milk.
After drinking it as he would force me to do thing all the time like the time he made me cut off the limb I was sitting on and the device came out of my shoulder being more powerful and in control I broke out with ring worm all over my body and my mom told me it was writing that could not be understood so she had priests come in from the church.
I guess my Dad did not know that one of the people at the church was in line for being my new dad but that was not in the cards because I guess he felt I was in need of discipline after an accident in the wood shop. I had been check out on the band saw by my grandfather who was a millwright in Arkansas/Washington etc. and to do some jobs the blade shield had to be removed. Some kids came in and wanted to use the saw, then got mad that I wanted to warn them to put the guard on and they told me they owned it all and I was not to tell them anything, and after this head strong kid cut his thumb off the other kids said they would tell their fathers it was all my fault, but it was not.
I had a fever of well over a hundred and I was a bloody mess with the infection. The priests came in with outer guys and one had a camera. The priests would throw me across the room well the other snapped a picture. I would fall on furniture and the floor and they would tell me get on the bed, don’t get off the bed very loud and when I would crawl back on the bed they would pick me up and throw me over and over again well the other priest would snap another picture and this went on till one guy said we have enough picture and they left me in the blood, mud, and bedding, then my aunt came in with some save that was for ring worm.
She spread the save and kidded me about dying when the rings got to my heart. After getting well I went back to the wood shop and the guys had made me a special shield and gave me my sword which were both made of wood and I had to fight one of the guys in my shorts because I did not want to remove them and the other guy was naked (he know who he is). I was still not up too speed and lost the battle. They then called me the bad guy and this group was supposed to be my gate keeper or something like that appointed by the priests. My Dad did not like them much also but that did not matter much because someone at the church was going to be my new dad till he said no, my mom cried allot, my dad was gone, I healed up, but I still have a case.
Please know that there is nothing any of you can do to make what you and the rest of the ones involved can do to make this my fault. See at the time I was about seven years old. Since then the church has made an effort to kill me, to the extent of trying to pass laws to kill sex offenders.
Come on, keep it up, keep pushing laws that you as a group of very said individuals know have no value. Take me too court so I can own a network. I have met with your staff members in private since along with military personal and others.
Now lets note when this happened I was only a small child being thrown around a room like a rag doll by people that started all this clear back in the late fifty’s and the steering by very bad people that think abusing kids to make laws to stop abuse, Ha! these laws are bogus and the fact that they can not kill gays anymore does not justify the use of laws too kill someone set up by them to create some worthless set of laws by a fusion of church and state is wrong and realty designed by them to harm us all.
My case was pragmatic but more than that I know what was done and who was involved making vendetta laws that really have no bases in truth, and are based in lies.
Keith Richard Radford Jr
PSS don’t be cowards, let me know you received this e-mail through a response.
It’s time to communicate