The Blatant Truth - Archive - May 2003

Saturday, May 31, 2003

What goes around, comes around . . . Can the Bush Cabal withstand a mushrooming groundswell of criticism? And how timely!! Just as he is off to his G8 Summit, touring Europe like a victorious and celebrated emperor instead of the lying and murderous war criminal that he really is.

Bush aides fear tumult in Iraq rising
John Walcott
Knight Ridder, May 31, 2003

WASHINGTON - Some of President Bush’s top advisers now fear the war in Iraq is becoming a political, diplomatic and military mess, instead of being the centerpiece of the president’s re-election campaign that they had hoped for.

“The postwar period in Iraq is messy,” said one senior official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “We haven’t found what we said we’d find there, and there are unpleasant questions about assumptions we made and intelligence we had.”

“If many more months go by and our troops are still there, the Iraqis are still fighting each other and us and we still haven’t found any WMD (weapons of mass destruction), there will be hell to pay,” the official added. . . .

U.S. troops in Iraq are becoming the targets of anger and ambushes instead of being greeted as liberators, as some Pentagon officials had expected.

Eleven Americans died this week from enemy action and accidents, and some civilian leaders privately say the relatively small force that quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi military is too small to restore order in a nation the size of California. . . .

Much of the administration’s public rationale for the war, and much of its planning for the war and its aftermath, . . . critics say, appears to have been based on fabricated or exaggerated intelligence that was fed to civilian officials in the Pentagon by Iraqi exiles who were eager for the United States to oust Saddam Hussein. . . .

Right, cowards that they are, the perpetrators blame it on everyone except the ones who instigated it in the first place: Bush and his puppetmasters, who have been pushing for this war since 1979.

Of course those slanted Iraqi intelligence reports were known to be just that: slanted. U.S. insiders say Iraq intel deliberately skewed, by Jim Wolf of Reuters, notes that “A four-person Pentagon team that reviewed material gathered by other intelligence outfits, . . . self-mockingly called the Cabal, ‘cherry-picked the intelligence stream’ in a bid to portray Iraq as an imminent threat, said Patrick Lang, a former head of worldwide human intelligence gathering for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which coordinates military intelligence.”

Anger among security professionals appears widespread. Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group that says it is made up mostly of CIA intelligence analysts, wrote to U.S. President George Bush May 1 to hit what they called “a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions.”

“In intelligence there is one unpardonable sin — cooking intelligence to the recipe of high policy,” it wrote. “There is ample indication this has been done with respect to Iraq.”

And Colin Powell, who used to command a modicum of respect, has been caught with his counterpart Jack Straw, British Foreign Secretary, in transcript of a telephone conversation expressing “serious doubts over their Iraqi weapons claims,” according to a story out in today’s [UK] Guardian. They had doubts, yet Powell had the audacity to hold up a vial in front of Congress and dramatically make a case for Hussein’s stockpile of WMDs, a major threat to American and world peace, he claimed. And Straw: in a speech before Parliament in February 2003 he noted that “Iraq will again use these terrible weapons. This is a key part of the moral case - preventing Iraq launching more wars of aggression, and dealing definitively with a tyrant who flouts international non-proliferation.” Straw claimed that “some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” So why were they not used when the country was invaded? Your country comes under attack and you hide your weapons?? Do people really truly believe this? These “statesmen” had doubts but they sure didn’t let on about them—and now Americans are being killed, still, at the rate of a few each day. And, if anybody cares, the latest Iraqi body count is estimated at between 5,400 and 7,000, and an ancient culture is in ruins, physically, politically, and spiritually.

Friday, May 30, 2003

The Bush administration—and its greedy, duplicitous, self-interested foreign advisors—have become so arrogant that they are now actually admitting the Iraqi war was started on the basis of political expediencey—as though they assume the public so believes in and approves of the righteousness of their phony causes that they can literally get away with global-scale murder. Or is it that they are so confident of their control of the media that they figure their coverups and lying excesses will fade away, sink to the bottom under “more urgent” scandals like the Laci Peterson case? This morning it has come out that Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary and architect of the Project for a New American Century and its murderous Middle East policies, has revealed in an upcoming Vanity Fair interview that the war in Iraq was justified on the basis of weapons of mass destruction as “the one issue that everybody could agree on.” David Usborne, writing in today’s UK Independent, (WMD just a convenient excuse for war, admits Wolfowitz), interprets Wolfowitz’s comments to mean the focus was on WMDs because it was “politically convenient. . . . [E]ven for the US administration, the logic that was presented for going to war may have been an empty shell. [The revelations] come to light, moreover, just two days after Mr Wolfowitz’s immediate boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, conceded for the first time that the arms might never be found.”

Most striking is the fact that these latest remarks come from Mr Wolfowitz, recognised widely as the leader of the hawks’ camp in Washington most responsible for urging President George Bush to use military might in Iraq. The magazine article reveals that Mr Wolfowitz was even pushing Mr Bush to attack Iraq immediately after the 11 September attacks in the US, instead of invading Afghanistan.

There have long been suspicions that Mr Wolfowitz has essentially been running a shadow administration out of his Pentagon office, ensuring that the right-wing views of himself and his followers find their way into the practice of American foreign policy. He is best known as the author of the policy of first-strike pre-emption in world affairs that was adopted by Mr Bush shortly after the al-Qa’ida attacks.

In asserting that weapons of mass destruction gave a rationale for attacking Iraq that was acceptable to everyone, Mr Wolfowitz was presumably referring in particular to the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell. He was the last senior member of the administration to agree to the push earlier this year to persuade the rest of the world that removing Saddam by force was the only remaining viable option.

And Wolfowitz mentions, “things that people warned were absolutely certain to happen if we went to war. . . . I thought were exaggerated. The one that has always worried me the most was the use of weapons of mass destruction. We still don’t know why they weren’t used.” Oh, gee, let me think on that one for a while . . .

Oh and tsk tsk tsk, now Blair, the duplicitous SOB, is being taken to task in Britain over this very issue: Emergency statement needed on weapons, Blair told, also in today’s Independent:

Senior MPs joined the clamour for Mr Blair to make an emergency statement on the affair when MPs return to Westminster next week, amid claims that he might have misled Parliament by exaggerating Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological arsenal in the run-up to the invasion.

Lord King of Bridgwater, former chairman of the Security and Intelligence Committee, and a former defence secretary, said there was a case for an inquiry into the Government’s claims that Iraqi weapons could be deployed “within 45 minutes.” . . .

[Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, said,] “Throughout the crisis government ministers went out of their way to say they intended to act in accordance with international law and justified their action on the basis that the threat from Saddam Hussein was both substantial and imminent.” . . .

And here we go again . . . the cojones of the Bush administration, at the same they admit their lies, to spin the same ones again, this time regarding Iran—this also in today’s news: ‘US plan for military action against Iran complete,’ in the Sydney Morning Herald, quoting a Russian newspaper (now how is it that these foreign news sources always seem to print this stuff about our own foreign policies first?):

Washington has drawn up a plan for military action against Iran, which it accuses of supporting terrorism and having a secret nuclear weapons program, a Russian newspaper reported yesterday, citing diplomats.

“The military action is designed to complete a popular uprising on which the Pentagon is counting,” said Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily, adding that the operation’s launch date would be decided at a meeting due to be held in the White House yesterday.

The action would be launched mainly from Iraq but military bases in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan would also be used . . . (my emphases)

Popular uprising? Isn’t that what they said was going to happen in Iraq? That “popular uprising” against Saddam Hussein that was bought and paid for with U.S. taxpayer dollars in the form of bribes to the Republican Guard? And I do remember the scorn on an internet message board that greeted my prediction that Iraq would be converted to permanent U.S. military bases, headquarters for attacks on surrounding Middle Eastern countries. The permanent bases are quietly being constructed, one at the base of the 6,000-year-old archaeological-treasure city of Ur, where U.S. troops, in their off time, were going and ransacking things: Troops ‘vandalise’ ancient city of Ur.

Let me see . . . checking a map of the Middle East (see this as an interactive map, including much more legible info re oil quantities, at The Thirty-Year Itch: Oil and Arms, from the March/April Mother Jones) . . .

. . . yup, Iraq IS very handy for invading the rest of the Middle East, and there IS plenty of OIL in Iran. In fact, Mother Jones notes in its March/April issue (link just above) “Today, the US maintains a series of military bases that almost encircle the Persian Gulf. Only two of the big five have no US military presence. With an invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration would rectify that situation. With the US firmly lodged in Iraq, Iran would be isolated and effectively surrounded, with American bases in Iraq to the west and Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east.” Will the American public again be duped? Are they indeed just a bunch of “sheeple” who can be manipulated at will, even to the extent of sending their sons and daughters to die in wars to line the pockets of corporations linked to our own presidential administration and foreign-policy “experts”?

Tuesday, May 27, 2003

A sad obituary for a dearly departed friend: Freedom
Beth Quinn
Times Herald-Record, May 26, 2003

Today we mourn the passing of a cherished friend.

His name was Freedom.

Freedom has been dying a slow death since Oct. 26, 2001, when Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act without debate or discussion, thereby administering a lethal dose of poison to Freedom.

Weakened and in pain, Freedom lost the will to live. His health further deteriorated as he came to understand that Americans were indifferent to the threat to his life. . . .

Sadly, the USA PATRIOT Act, in one clean sweep, took away Freedom’s power to protect those rights. Without a warrant and without probable cause, the government shoved Freedom into a dusty corner. With Freedom out of the way, the government said it could now access Americans’ most private medical records, library records, student records and computer activities.

With Freedom in its crippled state, the government also said it could now hold us in solitary confinement without charging us with a crime, without letting us have a lawyer and without allowing us contact with our families. Freedom languished, helpless to defend us.

Freedom was predeceased by his older brother, Common Sense. His death occurred 45 days after the birth of his archenemies, Fear and Hatred, born Sept. 11, 2001, at the Twin Towers in New York City.

It was Americans themselves who administered the final death blow to Freedom. It is likely that Freedom’s precarious condition was weakened by a broken heart in the realization that many Americans were either unaware that he was in jeopardy or did not care.

Some said it didn’t matter if Freedom died because it was the price they were willing to pay for protection against Terrorism, the Stepfather of Fear and Hatred. Americans forgot what Freedom’s Founding Fathers so fervently believed: Without Freedom, there can never be safety. . . .

Sunday, May 25, 2003

Does anybody still think that Afghanistan has been transformed into a viable and thriving democracy, or the Taliban suppressed, by Bush’s so-called War on Terror? While Bush and his buddies have been meddling in Iraq, turning that into “a society of either predators or prey” (Gun gangs rule streets as US loses control), Afghanistan is more than ever terrorized by renewed Taliban forces that have regrouped in the mountains and are targeting internationals, while the country’s infrastructure crumbles and warlords who take in and control more wealth than the central government of acting President Hamid Karzai reign over personal fiefdoms. According to a lengthy report in today’s Guardian Unlimited titled On the roads of ruin,

In a table of aid per person donated by the West, Bosnia came up top, receiving $326 per head. Kosovans received an average $288 while citizens of East Timor got $195 each. Afghans are scheduled to receive just $42 per head over the next five years. This is despite the fact that Afghanistan is almost, as Karzai says, ‘the poorest country in the world’ and in a far worse state than either Bosnia or Kosovo.

Take roads. After 23 years of war Afghanistan barely has any. The bandit-infested journey between Herat and Kandahar - once one of the world’s great trading routes - takes on average 17 hours today, requiring a perilous overnight stay at a local town or village. Back in the 1970s it lasted a carefree six hours. There are no meaningful plans to rebuild this vital route.

So far donor countries have committed just $300m to road-building in all Afghanistan, by coincidence exactly the same amount of money as is being spent on reconstructing the US embassy in Kabul. Much of that $300m is being spent on building an 80 km stab of road south from Kabul towards Kandahar. The contractor is Bechtel, the US construction giant whose Kabul representative says that 1km of road costs almost $400,000 to build in Afghanistan’s hostile environment. That means that more than $1bn is required just to recreate the 3,600km main ring road linking the country’s main cities: Mazar, Herat and Kabul. That money is not forthcoming, let alone the cash needed to pave over the numerous smaller roads.

Equally niggardly are the resources allotted for security. “Some 11,000 US troops, mainly Special Forces, still prosecute the war against terror. This is now an unending conflict, with echoes of Vietnam . . . ” whose aim “is emphatically not the protection of the population at large.” This responsibility falls to the International Security Assistance Force, which “confines its peacekeeping to Kabul, and has repeatedly turned down requests from President Karzai to stretch its tentacles around the country.”

Karzai’s pressure for countrywide security has been urgently supported by Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special representative in Afghanistan. Brahimi told us that even a few thousand troops, placed at key trouble spots around the country, would have prevented the lawlessness that drags down the reconstruction operation. ‘If we had had this kind of support,’ he claimed, ‘the Afghans would have been able to look after themselves after one or two years.’

Once again, statistics highlight the staggering scale of the Western betrayal. In Bosnia there was one peacekeeper for every 113 people, in East Timor every 66, in Kosovo every 48. There is one Isaf soldier for every 5,380 Afghans. Without an international security presence the Afghan countryside has fallen back into the hands of the warlords and their militias, conservatively estimated at some 200,000 strong. The international presence is feebly trying to counter-balance the power of the warlords by building up the central government security framework. So far those attempts have been at worst disastrous and at best meaningless.

The author journeyed to Herat to interview Amir Ishmael Khan, the warlord dominant in western Afghanistan, and describes

a scene that could have come straight from the Bible. The warlord was dressed in white robes and grey headdress. He is a small man, with a face that has seen and experienced everything. Watching him, you realise how a successful medieval English monarch must have looked. He fought against the Russians, and then the Taliban, who held him prisoner for three-and-a-half years before he sought exile in Iran. He came back to claim the governorship after the US invasion of Afghanistan.

From Herat he pays nominal fealty to Hamid Karzai - a portrait of the President hangs in his office - but in practice he runs his own fiefdom. Ishmael Khan’s well-equipped private militia, estimated at some 50,000 strong, easily outnumbers the 4,000 soldiers in the national army. He runs his own schools, hospitals and public parks. He finances it all by customs imposts taken at the Iranian border worth up to $800,000 a day. Practically none gets passed back to a despairing Karzai. The depth of the problem is so bad that last week Karzai threatened resignation unless warlords such as Khan start to pass their revenues back to the central treasury.

Peter Oborne concludes, “Out in the provinces the US army continues to arm and to pay the warlords who help them in their battle against al-Qaeda. Even as Hamid Karzai battles to establish his national army, he is being undermined by his allies. Hopelessly under-funded, without the security he pleads for, crippled even by his American backers, the Afghan President is perilously isolated. He, and Afghanistan, are being daily betrayed by Britain, America and the West.”

But this is the sort of thing that is going to come back to bite Bush in the butt. Today’s Argus online, for example, asks Will postwar chaos in Iraq become Bush’s undoing?

The Democrats need to be milking this for all its worth, getting the word out as to the truth of the situation in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Howard Dean, for one, made a recent statement, as reported in Saturday’s Des Moines Register: Dean: Bush plan for Iraq unacceptable, and “called on Bush to tell the public how long he expects troops to be there.” “I don’t think the American people want our soldiers there for 10 years, and if we leave, we’re in much more danger than we were when Saddam Hussein was running the place.” See Dean’s web site for his ideas on Homeland Security and other issues.

And on the matter of Homeland Security, genius Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen tells it like it is in this scathing indictment of the detention of Haitian refugees six months after they leapt off a boat in Miami, A homeland security charade. Even though a federal judge has ruled they pose no threat and should be released, Ashcroft “ordered that David and other Haitian detainees stay locked up without bond. Among those are numerous children, some of them toddlers, who have been confined for months under armed guard in Miami-area hotel rooms. They aren’t allowed to step out the door, much less play outside.

“How incredible that our tax dollars are paying for armed officers to hold children as prisoners. Makes you proud, doesn’t it?”

Friday, May 23, 2003

Cartoon by genius Ward Sutton

An eloquent speech that summarizes all of Bush’s lies:

The Truth Will Emerge
Speech by Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) on the Senate floor
May 21, 2003

. . . Regarding the situation in Iraq, it appears to this Senator that the American people may have been lured into accepting the unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, in violation of long-standing International law, under false premises. There is ample evidence that the horrific events of September 11 have been carefully manipulated to switch public focus from Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda who masterminded the September 11th attacks, to Saddam Hussein who did not. The run up to our invasion of Iraq featured the President and members of his cabinet invoking every frightening image they could conjure, from mushroom clouds, to buried caches of germ warfare, to drones poised to deliver germ laden death in our major cities. We were treated to a heavy dose of overstatement concerning Saddam Hussein’s direct threat to our freedoms. The tactic was guaranteed to provoke a sure reaction from a nation still suffering from a combination of post traumatic stress and justifiable anger after the attacks of 911. It was the exploitation of fear. It was a placebo for the anger. . . .

What has become painfully clear in the aftermath of war is that Iraq was no immediate threat to the U.S. Ravaged by years of sanctions, Iraq did not even lift an airplane against us. Iraq’s threatening death-dealing fleet of unmanned drones about which we heard so much morphed into one prototype made of plywood and string. Their missiles proved to be outdated and of limited range. Their army was quickly overwhelmed by our technology and our well trained troops.

Presently our loyal military personnel continue their mission of diligently searching for WMD. They have so far turned up only fertilizer, vacuum cleaners, conventional weapons, and the occasional buried swimming pool. They are misused on such a mission and they continue to be at grave risk. But, the Bush team’s extensive hype of WMD in Iraq as justification for a preemptive invasion has become more than embarrassing. It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power. Were our troops needlessly put at risk? Were countless Iraqi civilians killed and maimed when war was not really necessary? Was the American public deliberately misled? Was the world?

What makes me cringe even more is the continued claim that we are “liberators.” . . .

Tuesday, May 20, 2003

In Reversal, Plan for Iraq Self-Rule Has Been Put Off
by Patrick E. Tyler
The New York Times, May 17, 2003

BAGHDAD, Iraq: In an abrupt reversal, the United States and Britain have indefinitely put off their plan to allow Iraqi opposition forces to form a national assembly and an interim government by the end of the month.

Instead, top American and British diplomats leading reconstruction efforts here told exile leaders in a meeting tonight that allied officials would remain in charge of Iraq for an indefinite period, said Iraqis who attended the meeting. It was conducted by L. Paul Bremer, the new civilian administrator here. . . .

Related to the bombing in Saudi Arabia:

Soldiers of Good Fortune
by Barry Yeoman,
Mother Jones, May/June 2003
They fly helicopters, guard military bases, and provide reconnaissance.They’re private military companies — and they’re replacingU.S. soldiers in the war on terrorism. . . .

And the consequences:

Bombings Bring U.S. ‘Executive Mercenaries’ into the Light
by William D. Hartung
Foreign Policy in Focus, May 16, 2003

You had probably never heard of the Vinnell Corp. before the brutal bombing that killed at least nine of its employees in Saudi Arabia this week, but you should have.

This is the second time Vinnell’s Saudi operations have been targeted. The first attack, in November 1995, hit the headquarters of the Saudi Arabian National Guard, or SANG, and a nearby office complex that housed Vinnell employees. Though both attacks were decried by U.S. officials as senseless violence, they actually had a chillingly clear, brutal logic.

Vinnell’s job in Saudi Arabia is to train the national guard, which Jane’s Defense Weekly has described as “a kind of Praetorian Guard for the House of Saud, the royal family’s defense of last resort against internal opposition.” That is why company employees were targeted in 1995 and again last week. The story of how an obscure American firm ended up becoming an integral part of the Saudi monarchy’s handpicked internal security force is a case study in how unaccountable private companies have become a central tool of U.S. foreign policy. . . .

Thursday, May 15, 2003

In light of the Saudi bombings, this entry from The Complete 9/11 Timeline has chilling implications:

September 26, 2002 (B): A leaked August 16, 2002 report from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s influential Defense Science Board 2002 is exposed. [UPI, 9/26/02] The board “recommends creation of a super-Intelligence Support Activity, an organization it dubs the Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group, (P2OG), to bring together CIA and military covert action, information warfare, intelligence, and cover and deception. Among other things, this body would launch secret operations aimed at ‘stimulating reactions’ among terrorists and states possessing weapons of mass destruction — that is, for instance, prodding terrorist cells into action and exposing themselves to ‘quick-response’ attacks by US forces. Such tactics would hold ‘states/sub-state actors accountable’ and ‘signal to harboring states that their sovereignty will be at risk.’” [Los Angeles Times, 10/27/02, Asia Times, 11/5/02] An editorial in the Moscow Times comments: “In other words - and let’s say this plainly, clearly and soberly, so that no one can mistake the intention of Rumsfeld’s plan - the United States government is planning to use ‘cover and deception’ and secret military operations to provoke murderous terrorist attacks on innocent people.” It is further suggested terrorists could be instigated in countries the US wants to gain control over. [Moscow Times, 11/1/02] Could the US already be using this policy, and if so, since when?

Posted by Old and In the Way on 5/14 in a DU thread titled The Saudi bombing and Rumsfeld’s secret P2POG plan: “Something very odd with Al-Qaeda, IMHO. Their actions always seem to benefit this administration.” Well, we were in the process of leaving, which AQ had wanted. Now it looks like we have justification for staying, if not for strengthening our presence there.

I remember less than two weeks ago, when Bev Harris, who put together George Bush’s military record, posted on the Democratic Underground Discussion Forums her idea of developing the question mark as an appropriate symbol to highlight and publicize alarmingly unanswered questions by the Bush administration. A little surfing of her latest web site, Question W, shows this campaign has evolved. “Highjack the meaning of the question mark. If radical conservatives can hijack the media, the truth, and the Constitution, citizens can hijack the meaning of a question mark!” There are question mark images and question mark art, with new contributions daily, for adding to web sites, a “Gallery of Questions” for George Bush that fills a very long web page, and accounts of What People Are Doing with the question marks. One interesting idea: a “Question W Empty Chair Event,” held in front of the State House in Santa Fe, NM, while Bush golfed at a nearby resort. “Wherever Bush goes, we will be there with an empty chair waiting for him. In the best tradition of democracy, every citzen will have the right to step up and ask a question of Mr. Bush.” Citizens “ranging in age from about 8 to 80 . . . stepped up to the podium and posed their questions.” (example: “If we could spend $80 million investigating Bill Clinton’s Oval Office sex life, how come we are spending only $3 million to investigate 9/11?”) A reporter caught up with Bush at the golf course. He said, “I’m not answering questions. When I say I’m not answering any questions, it means I’m not answering any questions. But thank you for trying.”

Sunday, May 11, 2003

Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq
Task Force Unable to Find Any Weapons
by Barton Gellman, Washington Post, 5/11/03
“BAGHDAD — The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants.

“The 75th Exploitation Task Force, as the group is formally known, has been described from the start as the principal component of the U.S. plan to discover and display forbidden Iraqi weapons. The group’s departure, expected next month, marks a milestone in frustration for a major declared objective of the war.

“Leaders of Task Force 75’s diverse staff — biologists, chemists, arms treaty enforcers, nuclear operators, computer and document experts, and special forces troops — arrived with high hopes of early success. They said they expected to find what Secretary of State Colin L. Powell described at the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5 — hundreds of tons of biological and chemical agents, missiles and rockets to deliver the agents, and evidence of an ongoing program to build a nuclear bomb.

“Scores of fruitless missions broke that confidence, many task force members said in interviews. . . .”

Is anybody surprised?

Thursday, May 8, 2003

A week ago, Rep. Henry Waxman sent Donald Rumsfeld a 9-page letter (see below) admonishing him that shady Halliburton Corp.’s role in postwar Iraq might be a little, well, irregular. Despite cynical predictions that the letter would hit Rumsfeld’s round file faster than a speeding bullet, Waxman did receive a timely answer, 3 days later—and it turns out that the contract is much larger than had been reported before. “Previously, the US Army Corps of Engineers had described the contract given to Halliburton — run by US Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995 to 2000 — as involving oil well firefighting. But in a May 2 letter [of reply] . . . the army said the contract also included ‘operation of facilities and distribution of products.’ . . .”

Waxman noted, “Prior descriptions of the Halliburton contract had indicated that the contract was for extinguishing fires at oil wells and for related repair activities. These new disclosures are significant and they seem at odds with the administration’s repeated assurances that the Iraqi oil belongs to the Iraqi people.”

The Army Corps of Engineers says the contract is temporary and a permanent one will be advertised in a competitive bidding process this summer. It appears that Waxman’s questions about the appropriateness and legality of doing business with countries in Bush’s “axis of evil,” Iran, Iraq, and Syria, might not have been addressed, though a Halliburton spokesperson maintained that the company operates only within U.S. laws [cough cough]. And Ari Fleischer says, “Congressman Waxman has never met a Republican he didn’t want to investigate.” Congressman Waxman sounds like my kind of guy. Common Dreams has an article about it, and also, with more details, mass-media USA Today via the Associated Press.

Still, Iraq’s oil is not a cut-and-dried commodity that can be taken over by an invading army and then sold on the world market. A beginner’s guide to Iraqi oil, by Jac Wilder VerSteeg in the Sunday May 4 Palm Beach Post, explains very well the intricacies of the world oil business and the rock-and-a-hard-place situation of the U.S.: to get the oil on the world market it needs to get into the UN’s tried and true sales and distribution structure—but to do that, the UN would have to lift sanctions against Iraq, which under international law it can’t do until the country is certified free of WMDs—but of course the U.S., to save face and justify its disgusting war, must insist there are still WMDs somewhere in Iraq, but it won’t let the UN in to find them. The article also looks at the relationship between oil and terrorism and how even the Iraqi oil can make the world a more dangerous place.

David Corn blasts Bush’s lies that convinced the American public of the “urgent” need to go to war in Now They Tell Us: Postwar Truths and Consequences in the latest issue of The Nation. His conclusions: “War backers can—and will—argue that the outcome was worth the costs and the chaos. Indeed the murderous Hussein is out; the Iraqi people are fortunately no longer at his mercy. Yet this was liberation by deceit and misrepresentation, and the scent of fraud hangs in the air. It’s a swindle that, for the time being, benefited Iraqis but that undermined debate and democracy at home. And with projecting American power still a priority for Bush and his crew, a question lingers: What else are they not telling us?”

One of many things they’re not telling us is how the environment took a hit while all eyes were on Iraq. Sometime in April, it was reported in the May 4 New York Times (note: this will probably require a minimal registration procedure to open. For an abbreviated story not requiring registration, see Infoshop News), “With a single order, the Bush administration removed more than 200 million acres from further wilderness study, including caribou stamping ground in Alaska, the red rock canyons and mesas of southern Utah, Case Mountain with its sequoia forests in California and a wall of rainbow-colored rock known as Vermillion Basin in Colorado. By declaring an end to wild land surveys, the administration ruled out protection of these areas as formal wilderness - which, by law, are supposed to be places people can visit but not stay. Now, these areas, managed by the Bureau of Land Management, could be opened to mining, drilling, logging or road-building.” But the Environmental News Network today reported that “the Arizona Wilderness Coalition (AWC), The Wilderness Society, and other conservation groups filed papers in the United States District Court late Friday, firing back at the Department of the Interior’s plan to freeze wilderness consideration on more than 200 million acres of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).”

Commander Bunnypants, finally reporting for duty. Photomontage by Ian Bruce.

Sunday, May 4, 2003

George Bush’s military, er, “career” is finally getting the airing it so richly deserves. Seems he not only did not volunteer for service in Vietnam, as he implies in his autobiography, “he failed to report for duty in his Air National Guard Unit and skipped off to Alabama to work on a political campaign.

“In his book, Mr. Bush offers a lovely-sounding (but bald-faced) lie to describe his F-102 fighter pilot experience: ‘I continued flying with my unit for the next several years,’ he writes, but in fact he was suspended from flight duty in August 1972 and didn’t fly at all for the last two years of his service. (He also didn’t show up for duty.)

“Further along in his autobiography, Mr. Bush says his military service ‘gave me respect for the chain of command.’ Well, that is an odd way to describe ignoring two direct orders to appear for duty. He was then assigned to a disciplinary unit in Denver, and he didn’t show up for that either.”

Photos of genuine Presidential-calibre military men in uniform, including Al Gore, John Kerry, Senator Daniel Inouye, Senator Bob Kerrey, and James Earl Carter, who “spent more time on active military duty (7 years) than any other President in the last 103 years—with the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower” are included in this well-documented expose, which includesphotocopies of actual Bush military records. The brains behind it, publicityspecialist Bev Harris, posted to Democratic Underground that she sent pressreleases to 28,000 editors a few days ago.

After Bush made his messianic landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln, frenzied posting began on the Democratic Underground General Discussion Forum concerning the significance of the passage from Isaiah that he quoted at the end of his speech. Once again, genius William Rivers Pitt puts it in perspective in George W. Christ: “Do the math. Here is a man so steeped in self-denial that he can shunt aside his own shameful history in order to pretend he is on the same moral level as the soldiers he abandoned when his time of service came due. Here is a man intent upon making war on as much of the Muslim world as he can put his hands around, while wrapping around himself the image of Jesus Christ. It would not have been surprising to see the man standing on that aircraft carrier in the uniform of the service he failed to fulfill saying, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’”

Congress is getting peeved: on Wednesday, April 30, Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) sent a 9-page letter to Donald Rumsfeld asking him to comment on allegations that Halliburton Corp., recently awarded very lucrative contracts in postwar Iraq, “has profited from numerous business dealings with state sponsors of terrorism, including two or three members of President Bush’s ‘axis of evil’.” The specific allegations, summarized, are that “Halliburton and its subsidiaries have been linked to three nations known for their support of terrorism: Iran, Iraq, and Libya. Since at least the 1980s, federal laws have prohibited U.S. companies from doing business in one or more of these countries. Yet Halliburton appears to have sought to circumvent these restrictions by setting up subsidiaries in foreign countries and territories such as the Cayman Islands. These actions started as early as 1984; they appear to have continued during the period between 1995 and 2000, when Vice President Cheney headed the company; and they are apparently ongoing even today.” Waxman pointed out in his letter that “Marc Rich, who was granted a pardon by President Clinton, could be considered a ‘traitor’ for trading with Iran even if his actions were technically legal. These same concerns appear to be implicated by Halliburton’s conduct, yet rather than being criticized, the company is rewarded with valuable government contracts.”

In the news: Iraqi rage grows after Fallujah massacre
Phil Reeves, The Independent, Sun. May 4

If fish can feel pain, then maybe Iraqi children can too
Terry Jones, The Observer, Sun May 4
Scathing indictment of Bush policies and Blair complicity by a British observer

U.S. Iraqi Policy for Dumbbells
Bernard Weiner, Crisis Papers, April 30, 2003.
Excellent article summarizing What Happened in Iraq and how it relates to the Bush Doctrine/PNAC, prospects for the future in Iraq, implications of “democracy” there, and a bit on Bush’s chances in 2004.

This was sent in an e-mail with the message, “Here’s another outrageous aspect of our War on Iraq, the use of depleted uranium in shell casings. What hypocrisy on the part of the US govt, waging a war to ‘rid Iraq of WMDs’, while spreading tons of poisonous radioactive dust all over the country:” Depleted uranium casts shadow over peace in Iraq Duncan Graham-Rowe, with Rob Edwards, New Scientist, April 15, 2003

And an optimistic take on those scary polls that always show Bush having a gazillion% approval rating: “Poll full of bad news for Bush,” by Mike Hersh, from his “political commentary and analysis” web site.

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